


Chain of Command

by arcaneGash



Category: Splatoon
Genre: Gen, M/M, POV Alternating, every canon character shows up in some capacity, everyone else is an oc - Freeform, it gets gay later, rated for language/mentions of blood and wounds, trans male main character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 66,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23485942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcaneGash/pseuds/arcaneGash
Summary: When it comes to the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of Inkopolis, nothing ever truly stays dead, and the past haunts the present. An Octoling learns more than he ever wanted to know about his friends, and about himself.Updates whenever
Comments: 27
Kudos: 30





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all, i wrote a short thing for splatoon about ten months ago but now i'm back and i'm serious. this has been in the works for a Long time and i'm so glad to finally start posting it.  
> the story as a whole is i'd hazard about two-thirds written, and i know i'm playing with fire by starting to post it now, but with the lockdown and all it's a way to keep me busy, and likewise people will have the time to read it. also i cannot focus on anything else for the life of me but that's beside the point. i'll probably be safe and follow my established upload-once-every-three-or-four-weeks pattern unless i have a reason not to
> 
> couple context things about The Lore: i'll refer to "basal form" versus "upright form" inklings and octolings a lot in this story. the former basically means "squid/octopus" and the latter means "human." i just want to avoid using the term "humanoid" in-universe as i don't see why these species would name something that happens to their anatomy after a completely different, long-extinct species that are so far removed from their own phylogenetic branches. similarly, "uprighting" refers to the process of an inkling/octoling being able to hold humanoid form for the first time. someone who has uprighted has full control over that transformation and probably spends most of if not all their time in humanoid form.
> 
> there is a lot of dialogue in both the inkling and octarian languages. if both are being spoken at the same time, **octarian will be bolded like so.** if only one is being spoken per chapter/break you can assume it's inkling unless specified otherwise. thoughts and emphasis are in italics. i apologize in advance for my overuse of em-dashes.

The Octarian dome was a ghost town. What few streetlights that still had power flickered and sputtered as a lone shadow crossed beneath the ailing light they drew. Skyscrapers towered above the purple-inked stranger, barren monuments to a people that had long since abandoned their home. The buildings might have started to show signs of wear if there was any weather down here, underground, but the only nature the dome provided was a day and night cycle, projected on the dome’s interior “sky.”

Agent Four’s skin crawled—the emptiness was all-consuming. This was, somehow, _worse_ than the last time she’d been here, years ago, prowling these streets and expecting an ambush from enemy Octolings around every corner. Her hands had hovered over the holsters of her dualies the moment she’d set foot in the abandoned dome, but she was the only soul around, as far as she could tell. Her footsteps sounded like gunshots against the pavement, thanks to her stupid snow boots. The only reason she was bothering with all this old “hero” gear, the anti-stealth fluorescent yellow hoodie and the clunky boots and the flashing headset, was because it was more ink-resistant than the street clothes she wore underneath.

She reluctantly moved her right hand away from her weapon to further press her headset into her ear. “Okay, Three, you better start talking.” Her voice wasn’t louder than a mutter, but she swore it echoed off the eavesdropping buildings.

“Yeah, I’m working on it,” Agent Three grunted, his gruff voice low and rumbly over the headset. “You should be getting close. Think Eight mentioned it was around a subway opening?”

Four squinted at the darkened city around her. She’d have a hard enough time reading Octarian even if she could see any of the words on the signs. “That’s all you got?”

She could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Look, you and I both know there’s no one in here besides us, and even if there were, they’d be all kinds of stupid to take either of us on. Just find it. We’ve got time.”

“Maybe you do,” she snorted. “But I have work tomorrow. In another city. Can’t exactly tell my boss what I’m doing out here.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound it in the least. Four imagined the flippant shrug he was surely giving on the other end. “Neither of us can leave this dome until we know what the _hell_ is going on.”

“Do we ever?”

He gave a puff of air through his nose, and it crackled in Four’s ear. “Okay, shut up. We’re distracting each other. Lemme know when you find something.”

 _If,_ Four wanted to correct him, but he was right, they shouldn’t be wasting time chatting. She continued her march through the abandoned city, and pretended that she wasn’t getting chills every time she saw shapes through the darkness.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so tense—even her tentacles gently brushing against the back of her neck made her hearts pound. Be they friend or foe, if anyone were to sneak up on her now she’d blow them to bits with her dualies without a second thought. Hadn’t she sacrificed herself enough for Inkopolis, this city where she no longer lived? Her home was not out here, on the battlefield, in enemy territory. She’d left Inkopolis to get away from agent work, and though that had granted her a couple years of reprieve, she should have known it would catch up to her.

A flash of teal, out of the very corner of her eye, just for a moment. It was gone in an instant, into the yawning mouth of a tunnel that led further underground. She unholstered one dualie and with her other hand pressed her headset. “Gottem.”

“Oh shit.” Three was only taken aback for a moment, and then she could hear the grin in his voice as he added, “Go check it out. I’m right behind you.”

He was on the opposite side of the dome, actually, but being functionally alone couldn’t stop her from plunging into the dark. The heft of her dualies in each hand provided her a sick sense of comfort as she chased this glowing light into the abandoned subway tunnels.

It was damn fast—she watched it recede from her sight, even as she broke into a run and then a sprint, her ink tank bouncing with her movement and threatening to slip out of her siphon. She skidded as she turned corners, hurdled what was probably a turnstile, it was too dark to tell. She’d call out, but the chances that whatever this thing was could understand Inkling were minimal. Yelling at it in a foreign language as she chased it down wouldn’t do much to de-escalate.

The faint teal glow halted at the end of one of these tunnels—a dead end, Four realized. She slowed down, her footfalls becoming heavier until she finally came to a stop, still a good twenty feet away from this glowing object that had pressed itself against the wall. Now that she was closer, it looked like…a pile of some kind of ooze, jiggling as the thing it attached to moved. And that “thing” itself, now she could see the bioluminescent marks through the gloom, washed-out neon green at the tips of what must have been their tentacles. More than likely an Octarian—an Octoling, in basal form. A person who needed help. Still, having stared down the barrels of too many Octarian weapons in her lifetime, she could not bring herself to re-holster her own. But she could lower them, at least.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” she said between panting—she’d gotten out of shape since leaving the New Squidbeak Splatoon. An Octoling friend of hers had once told her that Octarian and Inkling were actually very similar languages. Maybe this person could pick up a few of her words based on cognates. Hopefully it wouldn’t be just the last two.

The Octarian shuddered, the weird goop stuff throwing its pale light across the walls. Then they transformed. The pile of goo rose up in the air as the Octoling got taller and taller, ink rolling off their body as they entered their upright form. Four absorbed all the visual information she possibly could: taller than her by quite a few inches. Dark blue ink, tentacles cropped pretty short to the head, their tips still glowing green. Seaweed was woven throughout their tentacles—an elite. Pale white skin, dressed in the typical Octoling armor, all black leather and protective metal plates, though theirs was long enough to cover their shoulders and abdomen. They should have had shades or goggles or something, to complete the military uniform, but the only thing they wore on their somewhat gaunt face was a scowl. The teal goo seemed stuck to their left shoulder blade, and peered at Four around its host’s head.

And, oh, they were wielding a _giant_ charger. An e-liter, Four was reasonably sure, nearly as long as the Octoling was tall. They weren’t aiming it at her, but had it in position, just as Four herself held her dualies.

Four evaluated the situation. No matter what, she would not go against her most central agent principle: never shoot first. The worst thing she could possibly do was create an enemy out of a neutral party. This had never been an issue in all her time fighting Octarians, the Octoling soldiers she’d encountered were all quite eager to get in the first shot, and she questioned the sapience of the basic foot soldiers, who didn’t hesitate either. But this was the first time she’d been within sight of an Octarian and hadn’t found herself under fire within seconds. Maybe this could be different.

She sure hoped so, because the distance between them meant the Octarian had an advantage, and Four would have to get in close to stand a chance.

It almost hurt to drop her dualies back in their holsters, but she did, and then raised her palms to the Octarian. The stranger watched her every move with a skeptical expression, their eyes—gray—narrowed. They tilted their head a degree to the left. Four froze. It was achingly familiar, everything she saw in this Octoling. They reminded her of someone. But that felt kind of _wrong_ of her to think, since he was the only other Octarian she personally knew…

“We’re cool, right?” she said into the empty air, and offered the Octoling a smile she was sure looked as forced as it felt. “Friends? Allies? Not enemies, bare minimum?” As deliberately as she could, she hooked her index fingers into each other in a crossing motion, then twisted her wrists and repeated it.

The Octoling scrutinized her for a moment more before finally releasing a sigh that sounded like they’d been holding their breath for an hour. They dropped their eyes to the ground and murmured something too low for Four to catch, even if she’d understood any Octarian. Their voice was deep but feminine. Four thought she’d read somewhere that only female Octolings could be elites in the army, anyway.

“I can help you.” She pointed to the teal goo, perched on the Octoling’s soldier like it was just along for the ride. “Come to the surface with me.” Now she pointed upward, through the tunnel’s ceiling, through the dome, through the underground, to the Inkling city. Of course, she had no idea what that ooze was, much less if there was anything that any doctor on the surface could do about it, but…what was the alternative? Leaving this person here, almost certainly to die alone?

The Octoling looked confused until Four indicated the surface. She gave her head a firm shake no.

“Uh…what?” Four tried and failed not to openly display her bafflement. “But…there’s nothing here for you. There’s no one left. They’ve all gone to the surface themselves.”

She wasn’t sure how much of her message got through, but the Octoling gained back her scowl, and now Four could see the age lines that formed around her mouth and forehead. She muttered something else. This time, Four caught a word that sounded a lot like “solo.”

Whatever Four had thought she might find down here, it hadn’t been this. She just gaped at the Octoling, her jaw slack. The stranger scoffed. Straightened up, put her weapon back in resting position in her hands. Brushed by Four like she wasn’t even there. Four turned on her heel just to watch her go.

_Now what?_

She got her answer. Not even halfway down the tunnel, the Octoling staggered, nearly falling against the wall and clinging to it to keep herself upright. Four was on the move in an instant, but came to a screeching halt mere feet behind her. Were this anyone else, she’d hook their arm around her shoulders and let them lean on her, but her gut told her the Octoling would punch her lights out if she even tried to touch her. So Four kept her distance, and shot a quick glance further up the tunnel.

The Octoling did the same and spat what was almost certainly an Octarian swear.

Sludgy piles of teal goop were inching toward them both, much bigger than the one the Octoling wore, large enough that Four thought one could swallow her whole. They weren’t fast, their locomotion reminding Four most of that of earthworms, but the way they were closing in on this narrow tunnel…

Click. _Blam._

The Octoling blasted the nearest one. The full shot bounced off the gelatinous pile and splattered the walls and ceiling around it.

Twice more the e-liter fired, and on the third shot the pile finally exploded, bits of the gooey substance raining down around them both. Four ducked behind the Octoling, covered her head with her arms, hoped against hope that none of it landed on her. The Octoling snarled, whether in frustration or pain Four couldn’t tell.

“Don’t do that!” Four hissed, now somersaulting out of the Octoling’s shadow to stand beside her, facing down this alien enemy. “We can’t fight it, we just need to run!”

The Octoling twitched in response. The goop on her back was making an undulating motion, all on its own. With a groan, she clutched her head in her clawed hands.

Four knew how to read a room. Her feet moved on their own, her boots pounding against the cement floors. The two puddles of goo blocking her way were a foot apart from each other, but that was all she needed. She leaped between them as e-liter fire sprayed overhead.

She flicked on her headset’s microphone, so she wouldn’t have to keep holding down the button to be heard, and fumbled for her dualies. “Need backup _now!”_ she barked, realizing abruptly that she was underground in the underground, the signal here was probably abysmal if it existed at all— “Now now now! Come in, Three, _please—"_

“I hear you,” Three’s voice crackled, and Four could have cried. “You’re breaking up a little, but I still got you—what’s going on?”

“It’s all fucked!” Four ran blindly, not remembering which turns she’d taken through the dark. She risked a glance behind her and dodged another charged shot. The Octarian ink spattered the ground beside her. “There’s goop, an elite Octoling, she’s gone _insane—"_

“Okay, save your breath.” Three’s own breathing was coming heavy, he had probably been running toward her location this entire time. “I’ll be there in a minute. Just stay alive.”

Easier said than done. The Octoling had managed to carve a path of ink around the blockade of teal goo and resumed her fire. Stray flecks of ink rained down over Four, and she hissed as it landed on her uncovered head. It burned, but only for a moment, before her adrenaline swept the pain away.

She fired in front of herself, as far away as her dualies could reach, and dove in and out of her own ink. The Octoling was doing the same, not too far behind, and she had the advantage of range. Four didn’t even have time to cast a glance back, she just couldn’t be in the same place for more than half a second. She snaked left and right as the _crack_ s of charger shots echoed throughout the empty tunnels, cutting through her headset and Three’s panting as he ran. Blue and purple ink spattered the walls and floor, but if this were a turf war, Four would be losing. Four _was_ losing.

Her mad dash led her to the subway platform, split in two by the groove that contained the rail. The turnstiles, the exit, shouldn’t be too far from here—she gasped as the Octoling lunged for her out of the streak of blue ink that had just landed beside her. She flailed away, shooting at the enemy ink, but the Octoling had already made a hasty retreat. Now Four balanced on the platform’s edge, the six-foot drop to the railing below more like an infinite abyss.

_Splat._

An enormous pile of sludge plummeted from the ceiling, landed mere feet in front of Four. She skidded on her heels, the cleats of her snow boots shrieking as they scraped against the floor, but they cut her momentum before it carried her straight into the goop. Up close, much closer than she _wanted_ to be, she could see it wasn’t a uniform, homogenous mixture. Colorful chunks of _something,_ none larger than her fist, floated around in the rippling substance. It gave off a smell: an artificial, sterile scent like that of plastic, but underneath it was a pungency, like what happened when she lysed cells at work. The scent of death—not rot, not decay, but the simple cessation of life.

She backed away with a quickness, her fingers on the triggers of her dualies. Shooting this thing wouldn’t help, she’d have to drain her ink tank completely to even make a dent, but maybe just the sheer force would slow it down before it got too close—

_Splat._

Inches behind her. Another one had dropped, pieces of it sprinkling the uncovered backs of her legs, where they sat, cold, like little hailstones embedded in her skin. The chill, and the scent, enveloped her. She rocked on one heel, too far gone in her step back to stop herself from falling right into its arms.

**_Blam!_ **

Pain exploded in her upper arm. Someone screamed. She was in freefall. A second later she’d hit the floor, her back taking the brunt of the impact, knocking the air out of her. The edge of the platform she had been standing on loomed above, and through the pain she recognized she was lucky to have not split her head open on the railing.

 _“Four!”_ Three’s bellow through the headset made her flinch. Though she had just screamed in his ear, too, so she’d call them even. “Are you okay?”

She tried to speak, but her tongue felt heavier than steel, a quality that was quickly spreading to the rest of her head and then to her limbs. Except her arm, which still burned like hell. No amount of ink-resistant clothing could mitigate the damage from an e-liter shot at full charge. The world was spinning, bits of blurry teal falling through the air like a meteor shower.

“Four? Agent Four?! _Maya!_ Just—just stay with me, I’m on my way!” She’d never heard Three’s voice shake like this. It would have struck her to her core if he wasn’t receding with every word he spoke. Even his panting into the mic got quieter as the distance between them expanded. She was so _tired._ But she fought, even as darkness swallowed the edges of her vision, even as her consciousness drained from the hole in her arm. Everything—her thoughts, her body, her life—was just inches out of reach.

She slipped away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to hell, maya. she'll be back, but if you want to know a little more about who she is you can [check out her ref here.](https://www.deviantart.com/shadowsplice/art/Maya-ref-828231230) i'll toss links to refs of my other characters as they're introduced. or you can just look through my gallery if you don't care about being spoiled.


	2. Chapter 2

The allegedly “soothing” chimes of the default alarm on his phone rose Topsail from sleep with the grace of a drunken tardigrade. Already scowling at the reminder that he was alive, he stuck a hand out from under his blankets and snatched his phone, swiping his finger across the screen to silence the noise. A grumbling kind of sigh tore itself from his throat as he sat up and groped for his glasses on the nightstand. Another busy, draining week awaited him. What he wouldn’t give for just one more day of rest.

He shambled about his apartment in his usual stupor. He relied on force of habit alone to carry him through his morning routine: bathroom, coffee, pack all his stuff and leave for work. His higher functions wouldn’t wake up until he tossed himself in his car, but at least he didn’t need them until then, barring some disaster.

The only times he looked at his reflection were passing glances like now, an accidental turn of the head toward the bathroom mirror. His skin was just as pale as always, from being cooped up indoors for most of the day, every day. He kept the rich blue tentacles on his head short, though no matter how short he made them one of them always curled against his forehead, and the tip of another stuck upward out the back of his head. If he didn’t pay attention, sometimes three oversized teeth on the left side of his bottom jaw would poke out of his mouth like they were now, reminding him to brush them.

The dark marks around his eyes had outward curves pointing toward his temples, in a way that most Inklings didn’t. The marks’ lack of connection over the bridge of his nose also identified him as _different_ to anyone with a sharp enough eye. But your average Inkling wasn’t that detail-oriented. He’d blended in as one of them for years, and even now that many of them could tell the difference, very few cared. It was almost funny.

What was less funny was the splattermark scar overlaying his shoulder. The damaged, darker skin also encroached onto his neck, and a fleck or two the size of his thumb on his jaw. Thankfully that seemed to be all that was visible when he was appropriately clothed, and it looked more like a birthmark than a wound that only people who fought in the Great War would have. He’d never gotten any questions about it, and he intended to keep it that way. He tore his gaze from the mirror and went about his business.

Clothes. He groped around inside and on top of his dresser, tossing on his usual work attire—comfort over style, always. Plain blue jeans, a t-shirt that had once been black but had faded to a dark gray. He had just enough functioning brainpower to ensure it wasn’t his secret Off the Hook shirt—if he wore that to work, Maya would never let him hear the end of it.

He stuffed the rest of his things into his backpack and made the drive to work, a research lab on a university campus. The school had come first, and the rest of the small inland city of Bigfin had followed—civilization for sure, but a far cry from the sprawling urban center that was the relatively-nearby Inkopolis. As much as the “city of color” had a reputation for bringing new beginnings, and it certainly had for him when he was there, there was just too much hustle and bustle for him to be comfortable. He needed his space. Out here, with a less-dense population, where he wasn’t blasted with lights and sounds every time he left his house, gave him more peace.

The drive was short and uneventful, as it almost always was in summer, when traffic was minimal. He climbed the stairs to his lab in one of the research buildings, unlocking the door with the key card he kept in a holder attached to his belt loop.

Lab seemed emptier than normal, he thought as he entered. Not physically; as always shelves were stacked almost to the ceilings with chemicals and old machines and autoclaved glassware. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something significant missing. Maybe he’d forgotten something at home, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He and one of his coworkers—fortunately the one he got along best with, the one who had pretty much strong-armed him into being her friend in a matter of weeks—shared a little office-like space at the far end of the lab’s many benches, tucked away in a corner alongside a window that unfortunately just faced the other research buildings. It could have been worse, though—they still each had their own separate desks, facing away from each other, and the close proximity meant he could turn around and ask her a question at any time. Right now, though…none of her stuff was here. The ancient desktop computer the university had so graciously loaned her wasn’t even turned on. He’d never beaten her in before.

He put his own stuff on his side, his brows knitting together. Okay, so she was late. Or had taken a day off, it wasn’t like she didn’t deserve it. There were plenty of reasonable explanations for her absence. But this premonition that sank its claws into his shoulders and breathed down his neck was unshakable. Damn his paranoia.

He sat down at his desk, checked his email, fidgeted with his pens. One text couldn’t hurt, right? She’d know it was the first thing he did upon clocking in, which would be a little embarrassing, and it really wasn’t any of his business, but…the reality was that he would not be able to focus without at least knowing she was okay.

Not even ten seconds had passed between him sending the text and his phone buzzing. A cropped picture of her face, a selfie she’d taken with his phone when he wasn’t looking and set as her contact photo, flashed on the screen. He stared at the little icon, looked at the way she smiled, her purple tentacles framing her face and her golden eyes alight, and wanted to believe she was okay as she appeared.

He accepted the call, biting back his first reaction— _What’s going on?_ —and instead managed, “Hey,” as casual as possible.

“Morning,” said a deep, masculine voice that was _definitely not hers._

Topsail recoiled so hard he nearly fell out of his chair. “What the f—who is this?!”

“Relax, man. I’m—"

“Why do you have Maya’s phone?!”

“Gimme a second to breathe and I’ll tell you, okay?” Despite his words, the stranger’s even tone made him sound much more calm than snippy. Topsail bristled regardless, but kept his mouth shut, for fear of giving this guy any more information.

“Alright. Call me Three. Me and Fo—Maya are friends, we used to work together. She visited Inkopolis over the weekend, but had…an accident. She’s fine, I swear, but she needs someone to take her home, and I can’t leave Inkopolis. You’re the only person who’s contacted her since it happened, so I figured she must be important to you.”

For once, Topsail was glad this was a phone conversation and not a face-to-face one, because all he could do was repeatedly open and close his mouth. Where to even _begin?_ “What happened to her?”

“Three” made a reluctant kind of groaning noise in his throat. “You’re not gonna like this, but I’m not allowed to tell you. It risks her, and me, and all of Inkopolis.”

“You’re not _allowed?”_ Topsail repeated. This was only the biggest red flag in recorded history waving inches from his face. His tentacles writhed, expressing the agitation he still fought hard to keep out of his voice. He soon lost that battle. “What did you do to her?!”

 _“Nothing,”_ Three snapped, the calm absent from his tone. “I would never--I swear on my _life_ I wasn’t the one who hurt her. We’re…tracking down who did.”

So she had gotten hurt somehow. Topsail had assumed that was the case, but having it confirmed made some white-hot, heavy feeling rise in his chest. His grip tightened around the phone, and he imagined it shattering beneath his fingers.

“But I told you she’s fine, and she is. She just…I think it would be best for her, for all of us, if she went home to recover. It’s stressful, being here…she’s been at my place since it happened last night, I didn’t have anywhere else I could take her. And you know her, if she stays here, she’ll hate feeling stuck. Hate infringing on my space, even when I tell her it’s fine.”

As loathe as Topsail was to admit it, the more Three talked about Maya, the more he sounded like he did actually know her. Unless he’d been stalking her…but then, why try to bring Topsail into it at all? Maybe he was a serial killer who exclusively targeted lab techs.

“So, listen. I’ll cut you a deal. You trust me with her safety…and yours, since I know what I’m asking you to do sounds crazy suspicious, and I’ll trust you with all our secrets. I’ll explain everything about everything, at enormous risk to this little, uh…agency we’ve got. We’ll be even then, yeah?”

Topsail’s computer had gone to sleep with his inactivity, and he squinted at his reflection in the blackness of the screen. “You would trust me, a total stranger, with this kind of confidential information?”

“You’re friends with Maya. If she trusts you, so do I.” A pause. “I mean, I think you’re friends with her…I don’t have a damn clue who you are, man. Your name in her phone is ‘T-rex,’ followed by the nerd and microscope emojis.”

Despite himself, Topsail almost laughed. “We’re coworkers. And friends.”

Three grunted in acknowledgement. “That would do it. Another reason is, I’ve already told you too much. I can’t go through her contacts and spill this info to everyone until somebody agrees to do what I ask. Was really hoping I’d get it in one. ‘S your call, though.”

Topsail weighed his choices. The chance to have a normal day was still within reach. He could turn his back on all of this craziness, be sure he would sleep in his own bed tonight, not waste one of his sick days even though he had plenty to spare. Really, truly, was this any of his business? He liked to stay in his own lane, it was always safest.

He squeezed his eyes shut. There was no point in pretending otherwise, he’d made his decision the moment this conversation started. Damn his scientific curiosity, damn his concern for Maya. “Where exactly am I going?”

“For real?” The smile Three wore was audible. “Dude, you are pretty much a hero. I can’t thank you enough. I’ll text you where to go—you and Maya both live in, uh, that little city further inland, right? How long’s it gonna take?”

Typical Inkopolitan. No sense of anything outside of the big city. “An hour, give or take.”

“Cool. Remember what I said about mutual trust, because I’m sending you my literal home address right now. Don’t let this kind of info fall into the wrong hands.”

Topsail’s phone buzzed against his ear.

“Guess we’re done here. I’ll be waiting. And, hey. Don’t even think about coming here with bad intentions.” His voice went icy. “I can kick your ass seventeen different ways without breaking a sweat. That’s not a threat, that’s a fucking promise. Don’t give me a reason.”

Topsail’s phone gave a three-note chime to let him know he’d been hung up on. He sat frozen with it pressed against his face for nearly a full minute. Did everything that happened to him today need to take an abrupt turn for the dangerous?

He recovered himself and plugged in the address “Maya” had texted him into his mapping app. An apartment complex not all that far from central Inkopolis. But if Topsail’s memory served, that wasn’t a great part of town. He’d have probably been relegated there himself after graduating had he not seized the chance to move away from the city altogether.

He was, at the moment, the only person in lab. No one saw him come in, and no one would see him leave. He’d shoot an awkward email to his boss later if it ever came up. Twenty minutes into his workday, he drove off, toward the big city.

-

“Hey, Four.” Three kept his voice low and his motions gentle as he tapped his knuckles against his own bedroom door. “You awake?”

“Am now,” Four grunted, and he heard his bedsprings complain as she shifted around. He stuck his head through to see her mostly how he’d left her, her upper body propped up with every pillow he owned, allowing her the freedom to move a little without agitating her left shoulder. She was lucky the damage hadn’t been worse, actually; her entire arm should have been blown off. Octarian weapons pulled no punches. It made Three doubt that she’d been shot with a full charge. Regardless, she was out of commission until she had full mobility. And being down an agent at a time like this…

Through the dimness of his room, the spots on the white underside of her tentacles were glowing a soft bluish-purple. He’d given her an old, ratty hoodie to wear, as her hero gear wasn’t to leave Octo Canyon and her street clothes were…in bad shape after the accident. Her eyes flashed at him through the darkness. “What’s up?”

“Contacted a friend of yours.” He held up her phone, would have tossed it to her if she wasn’t down a functional arm to catch it with. Instead he made the effort to walk all the way across the room and put it down on his dresser that functioned as a bedside table. She snatched it the moment his fingers left its surface.

“You took my phone?!” she snapped.

“Didn’t wanna wake you.”

“How’d you unlock it? You’d need my fingerprints to…” She shot him another glare.

He knew she got it, but mimed the procedure anyway, holding one of his hands flat and them limply smacking the fingers of his other against it.

She huffed. “If you hadn’t just saved my life, I’d kick your ass.”

“If I had a shell for every time someone said that to me.” He stepped back from the bed, cautious not to loom over her. “I didn’t mess with anything, or even look through it other than a couple texts. I was trying to find a friend of yours who’d be willing to take you home.”

Even without the dark, Four’s expression would have been impossible to read. Most of the time she was an open book, but she consciously chose to be available like that, and could turn it off whenever she wanted.

Her silence was not encouraging, so Three blustered onward. “I can’t leave Inkopolis myself, knowing what’s out there now. And I figured you’d rather be trapped in a car for an hour with someone you know. I could make one of _my_ friends do it, but they’re…” Strangers to her, and probably rougher around the edges than she would want to deal with in this state.

At this her lips pursed, though she still looked far from happy. “So who’d you…” She opened her phone, saw the last text he’d sent through her.

“One of your friends from work, I think. He was the first to ask where you were, so he kinda volunteered himself. I owe him a drink or something, don’t let me forget.”

Four remained uncharacteristically quiet, and Three remembered the last-minute threat he’d snarled into the phone. “Was that…is he not trustworthy?”

She laughed, or the closest thing to it, a quick puff of air through her nose. “Oh, no, he’s, like, the _only_ person I know who you can tell a secret of this magnitude. He’s fine. Good choice. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

Four stuck her tongue out between her teeth, squinting at the light that her screen emanated. “You didn’t…catch the person who shot me, right?”

Three tried not to grimace, his hearts quickening just by revisiting the scene where he’d found her. Neither blood nor violence fazed him in the least. What had made his stomach turn then was that the victim was _Agent Four_. The only Inkling he considered to be on his level, the only person besides him to have defeated the Octarian king. She was no pushover. She’d looked so _small._ Wounded, unconscious, alone. “No one there but you.”

“But I told you that she was—”

“An Octoling.” Three nodded. “Eight’s down there now, trying to find her. What about it?”

“Nothing. Just…thinking.” She set her phone back down on the dresser and sighed, settling back into her pillow throne. “Sorry…really tired all of a sudden.”

How convenient, Three thought, but he thought better of calling her bluff on the offchance that she was serious. She’d been through enough today, for sure…and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t on the verge of passing out himself. Her friend wouldn’t show up for an hour or so, and that was plenty of time for him to drop dead on the couch.

He’d already shut the door behind him when he realized he’d never asked her or this mystery friend his actual name. He pinched the bridge of his nose. Whatever. Three hadn’t offered his real name, either, so they were even. And Four could give all that information any time she wanted. 

He threw himself facedown on the couch in his living room, his nose smashed against the cushions. The day’s events unfolded before him as he closed his eyes. Four, motionless, in a puddle of dark blue blood that dribbled from the hole in her arm. Her weight across his shoulders as he fireman-carried her to safety, running his mouth the whole time, trying to keep her awake as she slipped in and out of consciousness. The desperate scrounging through the cabin at Octo Canyon for a first-aid kit. The unbidden memories of patching himself up after schoolyard fights as he went through the motions to do the same to Four. The nakedness he felt when he shed his spiked leather jacket and draped it over her shoulders to hide the bandages. The tension as the two of them staggered through the city, hoping no one had sharp enough eyes to notice the drying blue flecks on her undershirt.

She was fine now, he reminded himself. Alive, responsive, shades of her normal self shining through every now and then. With enough time, she’d heal, and they could all pretend this hadn’t happened. Pretend Three hadn’t yanked her away from her normal, safe life and sent her back into the domes to nearly get killed. Heat broiled in his chest. Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t lift his fist to sink it into the couch cushions, so he settled for imagining the plush giving beneath his knuckles.

It would have been so much easier if it had happened to him instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here's the loser whose head you'll be living inside for the vast majority of the story, [ topsail.](https://twitter.com/plectronoceras/status/1324421735366619136) he's not going anywhere, get used to him.
> 
> many chapters are going to have breaks and pov-switches like this. this one happens to be in chronological order, but most of the later ones are flashbacks. i hope that's clear enough from the context.
> 
> comments greatly appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

Topsail read over Three’s text for the eighth time that minute. The address matched up with the door he now stood in front of, but it was proving impossible for him to take the plunge and just knock. If he was wrong, if he’d ended up at the wrong building, he’d look like an idiot asking for someone named “Three,” and this wasn’t a great part of town, and he was an Octoling, and damn it all, he’d forgotten to take off his lab coat before leaving work so he looked like a complete tool and was just _asking_ to get jumped.

Had he really come all this way to turn back inches from his destination? Wasn’t the entire point of this fool’s errand for Maya’s sake? Giving up on himself meant giving up on her. He could practically hear her voice in his head, incredulity that threatened to turn scathing.

No, wait, he actually was listening to her voice through the door. “Dude, listen to yourself. They’re _Agent fucking Eight._ They will be fine.”

“I don’t want to risk it,” said a different voice, and though it was muffled, Topsail recognized Three’s low timbre.

“Even for a few minutes? He just texted me and said he pulled up. He should be here literally any second.”

That was Topsail’s cue, he guessed. He stomped his feet a few times, as if he’d just approached the door and hadn’t been standing in front of it for the past several minutes, and rapped his knuckles against the wood.

“Speak of the devilfish!” Maya said triumphantly, but there was still a pause, probably Three glancing through the peephole, before the door unlocked and opened.

Maya was standing in the doorway, and relief crashed over Topsail like a tidal wave to see her looking…entirely normal. That mischievous gleam in her eye, her brown skin unmarred, except for the tip of her left ear that looked like it had been chewed off, but it had been that way since he’d first met her. The purple tentacles on either side of her face, long enough to touch her shoulders, were slick and shiny, their movements fluid. The only thing was that she was wearing an old-looking oversized hoodie that he couldn’t remember ever seeing on her before. Flannel overshirts were more her style, he thought.

And to the left was an Inkling who could only be Three. Absurdly tall for an Inkling, even quite a bit taller than Topsail. Darker skin than Maya, his tentacles emerald green and cut in that weird style where they all sat on the top of the head and faced backward. (Octoling tentacles just did not grow that way, Topsail had tried once.) In stark contrast to Maya’s low-effort depression hoodie, he seemed fully dressed up despite the summer heat—black skinny jeans with rips at the knees, probably legitimate Dock Martens, a leather jacket adorned with spikes on the shoulders and studs and buttons on the lapels. His eyes were a vibrant magenta, and cradling the right one was some sort of discoloration, another shade darker than the surrounding skin, affecting even his eye mask. A birthmark? It looked a lot like a splattermark, though it lacked the same crisp definition that Topsail’s own scar did.

That threat had not just been empty words after all, Topsail felt. And he had a thought that he immediately buried in the deepest recesses of his mind, where he’d hopefully never have to encounter it again, but Three was also _much_ more handsome than he’d prepared for.

He only had a second to feel self-conscious before Maya stole the show in that way she did. “Hey, T!” she chirped, flashing him a huge grin. “Come on in…or not, actually, we were just leaving. Come with us!”

“What? Where?” Topsail felt Three’s eyes on him, sizing him up…and if he were Three, he wouldn’t like what he saw. “I thought I was taking you home?”

“Change of plans. Field trip to Octo Canyon first!”

That was…a name. Topsail tried not to bristle, especially when Three’s eyes flicked toward him again. But both Inklings stepped through the doorway, and Three quickly busied himself by fishing in his pockets for his keys.

“Anyway! Three, this is Topsail, my partner in crime.” Maya cleared her throat and indicated Three with a flourishing sweep of her right arm, though she kept her voice quiet. “The esteemed Agent Three, de facto leader of the New Squidbeak Splatoon, savior of Inkopolis, and probably a recurring character in Octavio’s nightmares.”

“Quiet, Four, we’re in public now.” Three pulled his keys out of the door and shot her a scowl.

“So? This is our DnD campaign, remember?” Maya offered him that _I’m-being-a-smartass_ grin that showed too many of her teeth, and Three rolled his eyes but did not protest again.

Topsail, meanwhile, was reeling. “You…you’ve been a secret agent this whole time?” he asked, too stunned to do more than whisper.

Maya shrugged and immediately winced. She nudged him along as Three took the lead and headed down the stairs. “I mean, technically, but not really. I only actively did agent work for one summer a few years ago. I’ve considered myself retired since moving away from Inkopolis, but…” She smiled again, but this one carried a wryness, a cynicism that Topsail didn’t see very often on her. “Let’s be real, you only retire from this kind of thing when you’re six feet under, and not a second before.”

“You didn’t move far enough away,” Three retorted from up ahead.

“You hear him? I’m gonna have to flee the country to escape.”

Their good-natured banter was the only thing about this conversation that wasn’t agitating Topsail. The sheer volume of questions that bounced around his head might make him explode. “So…is this, like, an official government thing, or—”

“Oh, hell no!” Maya cackled, and even Three made a noise that sounded like a dry snicker. “No one except us knows about us and what we do. Call it, I dunno, freedom fighting. Underground. _Confidential.”_ This last word was pointed, and Topsail fought the urge to roll his eyes. Like Three hadn’t already beaten it into his head. Like he even had anyone to snitch to.

“Underground in more ways than one,” Three remarked. The three of them had reached the bottom of the stairs and now stood in front of the complex’s parking lot. Three didn’t stop, continuing to lead them down the sidewalk.

“What exactly does this job of yours entail?” Topsail pressed, more asking Maya than Three.

He’d expected her usual buoyancy, but his question deflated her. She dropped her eyes to the ground, and her tongue poked out from in between her teeth—her thinking face.

“Well,” she said after a long pause. “We…our job is to protect Inkopolis and its citizens.”

A non-answer. Topsail waited for her to elaborate, but she never did. There was a reason she was being so evasive…and as the rest of the pieces fell together, his organs iced over.

His realization must have shown on his face, because her eyes widened and she dug her teeth into her lip. She dropped her volume to a whisper, either because there were people around now, passing them by on the sidewalk, or so Three wouldn’t hear. “I know how it looks, but I _swear_ it’s nothing personal—not on Three’s part and certainly not on mine. I don’t—I didn’t sign up for this, I fell into it and couldn’t just—just walk away when I learned what was happening, what was at stake—”

“Maya. Relax. It’s okay.” It wasn’t and they both knew it, but this was not the appropriate place to grill her. He offered her a half-assed smile that he knew didn’t reach his eyes, and she averted her own, looking a touch less panicked but certainly no happier. He tore his gaze away, instead focusing on Three in front of them. His jacket had a large painting on the back, between his shoulder blades: a sketchy black and white design of an ancient basal-form horseshoe crab, its tail forming one of the letters of the band’s name below. Topsail had never heard of it.

He turned back to Maya when he felt like he could look her in the eye again. “Can I just…ask one thing right now?”

She nodded, but he still hesitated, trying to wrap his tongue around the words. “Who started it?” he managed finally, already reasonably sure of the answer.

She winced. He was right. “They…they stole the Zapfish. Twice. And the second time they also kidnapped Cal—” She abruptly coughed into her elbow. “Someone important. It was…”

He nodded, trying not to show that his hearts sank with every word she spoke. Of course. Of course the Octarians had thrown the first punch. It was a foregone conclusion—why else would Octavio’s first and only priority been the military, even a decade ago? He would have been planning an invasion of this scale, one that would weaken the Inklings and strengthen his own, for years. The agents had only retaliated, taken back what was theirs. Still, even that logical reasoning made his gut twist.

And if he was being honest, the alternative, that the Inklings he had integrated himself with had turned around and launched an unprovoked attack on his kind, was not any easier for him to swallow.

“I’ll explain more when we’re out of the public eye, okay?” Maya said. He recognized it as a placation, and it didn’t sit right. Like she was expecting him to lash out at her…had he ever given her a reason to think he’d react that way? _Should_ he be angrier? He didn’t have all the facts yet, the last thing he wanted to do was commit to an emotional response before knowing the full story.

The full story that was nevertheless coming from an Inkling’s mouth. The same Inkling he considered his best friend. The same Inkling who had told him in all but words that she had been fighting, _winning,_ an ongoing war against his species for years. What else was she hiding from him?

He again busied himself with the back of Three’s jacket, watched the sunlight shine off the spikes on the shoulders. He buried his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, running the pad of his finger across the claw on his thumb.

Inkopolis on a late-morning summer day was much livelier than Topsail had expected or wanted to deal with. Freshly-uprighted Inklings wandered the streets in packs, chattering with their friends, bragging about their turf war feats. And there was the usual assortment of other creatures, too—jellies, a crustacean here and there, the occasional urchin and sea star. Topsail squinted against the sunlight as he absorbed every detail. Something like guilt rose in his stomach when he realized he was looking for someone, anyone, with suckers on the outside of their tentacles.

For what it was worth, the two agents had also fallen victim to this pervasive discomfort. Maya was the best at hiding her nerves, though Topsail saw her shooting one too many quick glances in his direction to be fooled. Three wasn’t much better off, neurotically checking his phone twice a minute, even after Maya caught up with him just to elbow him and mouth, _“Chill.”_

They walked. The silence was overwhelming. Topsail remembered to breathe when Maya approached him again, regarding him with maybe a little less fear in her eyes. “Hey, T, you do know how to go squid, right? Or, sorry, I guess for you it’s—”

“Yes, Maya, I can assume my basal form. What makes you think I can’t?”

Oh, that came out _way_ too defensive. Topsail winced at the chill in his voice—he didn’t know why it was there, it just happened sometimes—and Maya took a step back.

“Nothing, no reason! I just…haven’t ever seen you do it before.”

Topsail made an active effort to keep his tone even, lest it again slip out of his control. He gave as much of a nonchalant shrug as he could. “Not much of a reason to at work. It’s hard to do any lab work with these instead of fingers.” He ran a hand along the underside of the tentacle that tended to rest against his forehead. It uncurled with the motion, but assumed the same position the moment he took his hand away.

“You mean you don’t just, like…take a second to relax sometimes? Going squid helps me decompress. Clear my head, switch gears, before moving on to the next thing.” To emphasize, she lifted her right hand. Purple globs of ink began to roll down her wrist as her fingers congealed together, and a raised indentation formed in her palm before she shook out her arm and her skin returned to normal.

“I…have never in my life thought about doing that.” He could see why she did—even in his own somewhat limited experience, retreating into basal form made sounds quieter and lights dimmer, and he found an odd kind of peace in his diminished senses. But that also made him vulnerable, too much for him to be comfortable doing for no reason. “But I can do it,” he reiterated. “Why do you ask?”

“You’re gonna have to pretty soon. Octo Canyon’s a couple blocks away.”

He glanced up at the buildings towering above them all—they were near Inkopolis Square, in the center of the city. He shot Maya a look, and her lips quirked like she was trying not to smile. He rolled his eyes, mostly to hide his relief that she was no longer looking at him with such apprehension.

Inkopolis Square proper, to no one’s surprise, was packed. Crowds of young Inklings flowed in and out of Deca Tower, a significant line had formed outside one particular food truck, and there was a flock gathered around the Squid Beatz machines, cheering on one Inkling who was, frankly, killing it. Topsail risked a quick look at Deca Tower itself and took a selfish kind of comfort in the presence of the Great Zapfish, curled around its spire with closed eyes. Whatever incident that had drawn Maya out of pseudo-retirement, at least the city’s power supply was safe this time.

Though the Octarians were surely to blame regardless. He scowled at the cracks in the sidewalk.

He looked up in time to see the heel of Three’s shoe vanish into an alleyway. He came to a halt immediately, but Maya bumped her shoulder against his and inclined her head toward it.

“Are you kidding?” he hissed.

“You wish. Get in there before we draw too much attention.” She ducked away too, so smoothly it was as if she’d rehearsed it. The mere notion of being watched made anxiety gnaw at the pit of Topsail’s stomach, so he darted into the dark after her.

The shade of the alleyway was just barely enough for the Inklings’ bioluminescent spots on the undersides of their tentacles to start glowing, and Topsail knew the tips of his own were doing the same. He almost felt like Maya was staring at him, but when he glanced her way she was facing Three. She stepped forward, closer to him, her hand outstretched. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, and a moment later, her tentacles were his same shade of emerald green.

“Pass it on,” Three grunted before reverting into his basal form and appearing to just slip underground.

Topsail followed Maya further into the back of the alley, and the two of them stared down into a sewer grate. Maya didn’t seem to share his surprise, so Topsail could only assume she knew Three hadn’t decided to take a dive in Inkopolis’s septic tank.

“You’re gonna want this,” Maya said, shaking her head so her tentacles rippled. It was so weird seeing her in any color that wasn’t purple. He chose not to say so, however, and instead did what Three had just done, taking the hand she offered. He’d never liked this part—ink-sharing always felt so much more _intimate_ than how most of Inklingkind treated it. Kids would do it with total strangers just to fill up their teams for an after-school pretend turf war…Maya was warm beneath his fingers. His chromatophores reacted, almost tingling in his tentacles as the new color washed over him. He let her go the instant the change was done, a moment later regretting the quickness with which he distanced himself, but…Maya understood, he thought. Physical closeness was not something he was used to, or wanted in much capacity. He could only tolerate it if someone like her, someone he trusted to the ends of the earth, was asking.

She indicated the grate with an open palm, but Topsail balked at the thought of going basal in front of her. “Ladies first,” he said, smothering the weird little flare of nervous euphoria at his own words.

She snorted, but began to shrink. Her ragged ear was that much more obvious in squid form, Topsail thought idly. Basal-form Inklings were rather arrow-shaped, and the leftmost point of hers was…barely existent. Maybe that was why she seemed to be favoring her right side. Her left tentacle that had been her arm dragged along the cement as she used her right one to pull herself up onto the grate. She, too, slipped through without a trace, except now Topsail was close enough to hear a wet _slap_ from within, followed shortly by a muffled _crack._

This was it. This was his chance to turn tail, go back home and forget all this weird stuff had ever happened. Yet, as tempting as the thought was, he treated it as nothing more than a brief flight of fancy, a shallow daydream torn unfinished from an overworked mind. He’d come this far—he knew too much, if this whole “agent” thing was true. And he could fight it all he wanted, but he could not deny his own curiosity.

He let his breath out in a huff, steeled his nerves, and reverted to octopus form.

Maya was right to wonder if he was even capable of doing it, honestly. Most people their age got all the practice they needed through turf wars and the like, and she knew well his aversion toward all of that. And ignoring this innate ability meant the transformation would be hard to hold, a hurdle that only increased in severity with age. So he went out of his way to practice, in the privacy of his own home, where no one could see the scar on his shoulder. He could do it and do it well if there were ever an emergency, or a weird situation like this. But no amount of practice would ever make the feeling of his skin shifting beneath the protective coat of his own ink any more comfortable.

The world stretched upward around him, the surrounding buildings seeming to disappear into the sky above. The basal form’s vision was so similar to upright form, but just different enough that he always needed a second to adjust. Like putting on an old pair of glasses with a slightly out-of-date prescription. That was the only thing he liked about basal form over upright, he didn’t need his glasses…everything on his person, everything touching his skin, dissolved into ink as his body did. The best and brightest Inkling and Octarian scientists alike hadn’t yet discovered how that was possible, and he’d be lying if he said that evasive knowledge didn’t irk him.

He extended one sucker-laden tentacle, the one that had been his right arm, and dragged himself forward. Gravity pulled him through the metal grate, his skin melting into viscous ink and then reforming back semi-solid as he fell. He was only airborne for a moment; he hit something rigid. Sleek, ink-proof, he determined as his roaming tentacles grazed the surface and did not stick. The only light poured in from the grate above, and it wasn’t much. Less than a meter behind him was a pool of swirling ink, as if it were on a disk affixed to this platform. A launchpad. Octarian tech.

It was Three’s shade of green— _exactly_ Three’s shade of green. Just eyeballing the color to match it wouldn’t work, not with this kind of tech, attuned to one individual’s ink signature at a time. He inched toward the launchpad, the vortex of ink sucking him in like a whirlpool.

Logically, he knew what would happen next, but mere reason could not prepare him for the launch. He hurtled through the darkness, wind whipping past him, ink leaching from his skin. He opened his eyes just in time to see the literal light at the end of the tunnel. Another grate. The metal diced him painlessly, and then his face met dirt.

He turned back to upright form before anything else, before anyone could see the scar. In his rush, he reverted to his natural dark blue ink. Then, finally, he sat up to take in his new surroundings. Fresh air, so it was far from the city. Massive rock formations loomed in the distance, more than a few shaped like tentacles…Octarian tentacles at that. He didn’t recognize them, not really, but his gut clenched regardless.

Much closer to him than the canyon walls was a little house, built mostly of wood and sheets of metal. It overlooked a clearing, no pavement in sight, the grassy ground giving way to the same rocks that reached for the morning sky. Topsail noted the training dummies, begging to be splatted, and the bench that sat outside the cabin.

Fortunately, neither Three nor Maya had been watching him emerge, so they missed his incredible faceplant. They both seemed preoccupied, Three rounding the corner and vanishing behind the house as Maya came to a slow stop and squinted at her environment, like she’d never been here before either. Her tentacles were still green.

Topsail got to his feet. “What’s up?”

Maya turned to face him, her eyebrows knitted together. “I was under the impression that we were gonna—”

 _“Eight?”_ came Three’s voice from behind the house. Maya’s entire body went rigid, and her natural purple went shooting down her tentacles. “Oh shit, they’re gone.”

Before Topsail could ask, Three had rounded the corner again, his jacket already down around his elbows _why was he taking his clothes off._ “No trace,” he hissed as he vanished inside the cabin and slammed the door shut, abandoning his jacket on the ground.

Maya met Topsail’s bewildered gaze and offered half an apologetic shrug. “This…didn’t go as planned,” she said, shaking her head. Then she raised her voice to be heard through the wooden door. “Hey, Three, I know you’re worried, but cool your jets a little.”

“We left Eight _alone_ with an Octarian who fuckin’ _shot you_ and you’re telling me to calm down?!” Three yelled. Whatever he was doing in there, it made a racket. Clattering noises and the stomping of his shoes on the floor punctuated his words.

Topsail’s mouth fell open. “You got shot?!”

Maya ignored him. “First of all, that was a fluke ‘cause I’m out of practice, secondly, Eight’s more competent than the both of us put together. One Octarian is not going to take them out.”

Rather than respond verbally, Three threw the door open with a bang. He’d changed wardrobe almost entirely, adorned in a black and yellow outfit that clashed hard with his initial fashion choices. A puffy fluorescent vest, running shoes, a headset wrapped around the back of his head…the only thing he hadn’t changed was his jeans. He was holding a weapon, one that looked much less…goofy than the turf-war-grade guns Topsail had come to recognize. All black with glowing lights, made of a sleek ad shiny material. A shooter, he reasoned, with some kind of bulb-like appendage that might have been the ink container.

Three pressed a finger into one of the earpieces as he stormed out of the house, toward the path that led further into the canyon. “Eight? If you’re there, come in, I’m _begging_ you.”

The most awkward ten seconds of silence Topsail had ever experienced in his life passed, and Three shot Maya a withering glare. She didn’t shrink away, but she dropped her eyes to the ground.

Three squeezed his eyes shut and took in a measured breath. “Okay. Battle plan. I’m going out there, I’ll search every damn dome in the canyon if I have to. Four, you’re staying here. Play ground control for me.”

Maya looked for a moment like she was about to protest, but thought better of it and shut her mouth.

Three met Topsail’s eyes and his hearts plunged into his stomach. “You…come with me.”

 _Into the underground?_ Topsail’s attempt at a poker face failed miserably. His tentacles writhed against his forehead.

“Uh, what?” Maya made a motion like she was going to cross her arms, but flinched and chose instead to keep them at her sides. “So I’m a liability, but an untrained civilian isn’t? No offense, T.”

“The untrained civilian can speak Octarian and is not recovering from a gunshot wound,” Three retorted.

Maya pursed her lips. “Yeah, okay, that’s fair.”

“Wait,” Topsail said, shame at what he was about to say already flooding him. Under any other circumstances, this would be one of many secrets he’d take to the grave, but not being upfront about this would inevitably come back to bite him, he was sure. Three deserved to know. “You don’t want…you’re not expecting me to…be of any help, are you? Combat-wise, I mean?”

Three raised an eyebrow, and Topsail prayed the rush of blood to his face wasn’t as visible as he felt. “I wasn’t gonna hand you a gun and turn you loose on the Octarians. But I am trusting you to not be stupid. Keep yourself alive, at the bare minimum. Can you handle that?”

Topsail burned at being patronized, and more at knowing he’d invited it. Some first impression he’d made on Three…and why did he even care what Three thought of him, anyway? _Stop being stupid._

Maya raised her hand, as if she were in class. “I vouch for his intelligence and lack of suicidal tendencies.”

“Fantastic. Look, I’m done wasting time. I’m going to find Eight.” Three turned his back, the ink tank strapped to it already two-thirds full even though he’d only donned it a minute ago. Topsail hesitated. The choice was clear, inevitable, really, but he needed a moment to accept that this was what he was really doing.

“See you guys when you get back,” Maya called, backtracking toward the house.

Topsail could take a hint. He’d always known she’d be the death of him, though maybe not so indirectly. He broke into a jog to catch up to Three as the two of them passed underneath the rocky archway, entering Octo Canyon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> enter agent three, who has a very special place in my heart. i'm not gonna post his ref yet as it's spoiler-y but i will in a few chapters. also i apologize for linking to deviantart, which everyone rightfully hates. i think at the end of the story i'll post links to each character's respective pages on my toyhou.se, i just can't yet because their bios are Super spoiler-heavy.
> 
> octo canyon and the cabin base are bigger than they look in-game please do not question me. also i should probably admit i've never played splatoon 1, only 2, so bear with me on that as well


	4. Chapter 4

Gravel and dried grass crunched beneath Topsail’s shoes, breaking the near-silence of the canyon. Metal structures lay scattered around the area, and Three systematically approached each one, squinted at it for a while, and shook his head and moved on. Topsail desperately wanted to know what he was doing but would sooner disembowel himself than ask.

To his surprise, it wasn’t his scientific curiosity getting the better of him that caused Three to speak to him. It was Three who asked a question first. “You know this place any better than I do?”

“Uh…no.” The atmosphere was giving Topsail chills, and he was on the verge of reliving some memories he’d really rather have kept locked away, but he didn’t _recognize_ anything he saw now, not any more than he’d “know” a place he’d only seen in pictures.

Three grunted. “You’re a Valley Octarian, then. Like Eight.”

“I…don’t think that’s true, either.” Three was looking the other way, allowing Topsail the freedom to sink his teeth into his lip. Were all his secrets to be torn from him at once? He didn’t even know Three’s actual name, for the seas’ sake.

“You don’t think?” Three flashed him a look out of the corner of his eye, and Topsail’s hearts did backflips.

“I…” Topsail’s mouth went dry, and he swallowed. “I came up to the surface a long time ago. A lot of the details escape me, but it wasn’t here, I know that much. It was more…east of Inkopolis, they said.”

Three grunted again, but this one was less a noncommittal acknowledgement and more an interested hum in his throat. He approached another metal thing stuck in the ground—up close, Topsail almost thought it resembled a tea kettle. Three leaned down a little, but then stalked away, a scowl twisting his face.

Now that Three had been the first to speak, Topsail felt at least a little more comfortable asking his own burning questions. “What are you doing?”

Three shot him a glance over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed. “Dude. I have no _fucking_ idea.” He brought up one of his hands, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, to knead his forehead with his knuckles. “None of the kettles should still be active, I don’t know why I’m even bothering to listen. Eight could be in any one of these damn things, and that’s not even counting the other sectors!” He curled his lip, staring vacantly over the distant horizon. Inkopolis’s skyline loomed, a faint shadow even in the daylight.

Topsail winced, turning on his heel to look back over the area, the “sector.” Fully conscious of how useless he was proving to be, he racked his brain, as if buried somewhere deep in his memory he could extricate some instinctive Octarian knowledge, or something…but as usual, he came up empty. He really was nothing more than an exotic Inkling, like he had passed as up until about two years ago, when the surface world abruptly opened its arms to the same people it had driven underground a century ago.

Not that he had any seahorse in that race, but…

Something in Three’s direction beeped. Topsail turned back around as the agent stood up straighter, cocking his head. Topsail was close enough that he could hear Maya’s voice, but could not decipher any words.

Three pressed a finger into the headset again, his relief palpable. “You did? You’re a lifesaver.” He pivoted, kicking rocks out of his way as he ventured further into the sector. Topsail followed.

The deeper they climbed into Octo Canyon, the more the rocky terrain gave way to metal and glass platforms. Three led Topsail into an area that he could have mistaken for any Inkopolitan neighborhood, if it weren’t so utterly barren. The brick buildings, the pavement, the colorful stickers on the insides of the windows…had the Octarians built this, only to be beaten back underground? This tiny glimpse of the surface world would have been all some of them would ever see…

They came to a stop outside another kettle, Three bending down to pick something off the ground. He turned it over in his hands: another headset, much like the one he was currently wearing, but they looked much more like headphones with rounded earpieces than his.

“Got ‘em,” he muttered. “They’re not _obviously_ broken…”

“So we don’t have to assume the worst,” Maya said through Three’s headset, as now Topsail was close enough to pick out words, muffled as they were. “For all we know the Octarian took off, and Eight gave chase, and their headset came flying off. It happens.”

“To you,” Three snorted. “Alright, I’m feeling lucky. Gonna give this one a shot.” He met Topsail’s eyes and held out the headset. “Here. These are expensive as hell, so keep ‘em safe.”

They looked it, a much lighter weight than their bulk would suggest. Pale blue lights radiated out from the center of each earpiece, pulsating rhythmically like the tide. Topsail tentatively put them on, but inwardly recoiled at the way they crushed his ears to his head, against the arms of his glasses, and the way they muffled the sounds of the outside world. He couldn’t purposely deafen himself like this, not when he was venturing into “enemy” territory. He pulled them down so they instead rested on his neck and shoulders.

Three was sizing him up again, and chose not to comment on his refusal to properly wear the headphones. “Are you gonna keep that coat on?”

Topsail remembered the lab coat he was wearing and plucked at one of the sleeves. Maybe his absentmindedness had done him a favor, for once. “It’s ink-resistant.”

Three nodded. “Good call. Even if it wasn’t, layers will save your ass. Just…be careful of the length and the looseness. You don’t need it to be catching on everything, trust me.”

Topsail got the message and paused to button up the coat. When he looked up again, it was just in time to see green ink splash up from the kettle’s grated opening. He grimaced, but dove in too.

He plummeted for what felt like far too long, landing hard with an impact that rattled his brain and sent ripples throughout his basal-form body. Never had he been gladder to be an invertebrate. He went upright as soon as his eyes stopped rolling in his head and squinted through the darkness of the underground.

In hindsight, he should have expected it to be this gloomy, given the agents’ prior retrieval of the Zapfish. Everything Three was wearing seemed like it was designed to keep him visible in the dark—his shoes lit up as he walked, the top of his ink tank flashed, and of course, blue speckles glowed on the white undersides of his tentacles. Stealth was apparently not a concern when it came to agent work. Not that Topsail was much better, with his white lab coat providing a stark contrast against the dark.

What was this place? Topsail squinted through the gloom, seeing spiraling rock formations intertwined with sprawling structures of metal. A quarry? There was grass and dirt underneath his feet again, but the air was cool and stale. Behind him, beyond the kettle, a giant cliff loomed. Spires of rock stretched so far into the sky that he couldn’t see where they ended.

“Four, you got anything for us?” Three’s muttering would have been inaudible if Topsail’s headphones hadn’t amplified it.

Maya hummed thoughtfully, though even that was tinny and distant. “Let’s see…Suction-Cup Lookout…I bet you guys are in the dome with all the octozeppelins. That was a wake-up call, let me tell you.”

 _Octo-what?_ Topsail tried to catch Three’s eye and almost recoiled when he got it. Three’s right eye was aglow with a vibrant teal. It traced a thin outline of the splotchy discoloration on his face, and even invaded his eye itself, his sclera dark but his iris neon green.

Topsail at least managed to not gasp aloud, but that was where his self-control ended. His right shoulder seared, and he clamped down on it with his left hand.

Three’s glowing eye flicked to him, then away, to the surrounding area. “You sure? This place…doesn’t look like a typical Zapfish-guarding obstacle course.”

“Why would it, now that what it’s guarding is gone? If the Octarians were smart, they’d have torn all that crap down after they lost, maybe repurposed it for something better. Maintaining all that machinery can’t be energetically efficient.”

Three murmured his cautious agreement. He peered around the piles of rock, his gun hanging loosely in his fingers. Topsail forced himself to step away from the kettle and toward him, ignoring the pressure that had settled itself in his lungs, ignoring the lingering flares of ghostly pain in his shoulder.

Though they walked along the cliffside, nothing changed. Rocky outcrops, twisted and broken scraps of metal, frayed wires that shed sparks. One panel of the sky was glitching out, flickering occasional static amongst its darkened neighbors. Topsail had forgotten about the projected sky, how it appeared seamless until one saw for themself what it was trying to imitate. He’d grown so used to the real thing that his birthplace’s recreation felt more like a mockery, one that made his stomach turn. How many times had he promised himself, the only self-soothing tactic he’d had at age twelve as he laid in bed and fought back tears, that he’d never have to come back? _Sorry, kid._

A noise interrupted his swirling thoughts, and he whipped around, his shoes scuffing in the dust. To his eleven, there was…something barrel-shaped, cylindrical, lying on its side. Its diameter was nearly twice his height, and within the opening was a semicircular shutter that looked like half of a set of doors. It was dark colored, maybe an olive green, and had faint Octarian writing around the mouth—just a serial number, nothing exciting. As he stared at it, he swore he heard another sound coming from it, a _clunk_ of something thudding against the metal.

He backed up, hoping he’d managed to avoid being seen by whoever, or whatever, was in there. He could have called out to Three across the quarry, but felt it a bad idea to raise his voice. Instead his fingers searched the earpieces of the headphones around his neck, trying to emulate Three pressing his own headset whenever using the radio line. He at last found a tiny button on the right ear, and hoped the mic, wherever it was, would pick up his voice.

“Hey, Three?” He picked out the silhouette of the Inkling agent, thirty feet northeast. “To your eight. There’s something, or someone, in this giant cylinder near the cliff.”

Three’s silhouette gave a single nod and pivoted. Damn, that green part of his eye was bright, Topsail could see it even from this distance. “You think so?”

“I’m hearing noises.” As the words left his lips, Topsail’s brain miraculously produced a thousand other explanations for the sounds he was hearing, besides the absurd idea that the two people they were looking for just so happened to have sheltered inside. He’d gotten Three’s, and Maya’s if she were listening, hopes up for nothing. _Drawing conclusions based on minimal evidence. And you call yourself a scientist, idiot._

“Good catch.” Three’s tone was gruff, but not sarcastic, so Topsail could only assume he meant it as a compliment. His guilt increased tenfold.

By now Three was there, avoiding the opening of the tube as to stay out of sight from the inside. His grip on his weapon was much tighter than it had been a minute ago. He cleared his throat.

“Agent Three of the New Squidbeak Splatoon,” he announced, stepping in front of the mouth and into view of the cylinder’s inhabitants. “Not looking for a fight, just infor—”

“Three!” the barrel exclaimed, and someone burst out, skidding to a halt right before they plowed into him. Topsail’s hearts leaped into his throat. An Octoling, Topsail noted the suckers on the outside of their tentacles, and the blue rings that glowed at the ends. They were nearly as tall as Three, and their ink looked like a warm color, maybe red or pink. They might have been smiling, but Topsail only relaxed when Three did, his shoulders dropping and the barrel of his shooter lowered to the ground.

“Shit, Eight, don’t scare m—I mean, what happened? Are you okay?” He glanced them over even as they nodded.

“I am fine, Three. I am sorry for making you concerned.” Eight’s Inkling was a little stilted, and they had a heavy accent that reminded Topsail of one of his old friends. They held out their arms, a little hesitant. A second passed until Three did the same, and Eight crashed into him in a hug. Three patted their shoulder, his glowing eye rolling. “I forgive you. Really.”

Eight pulled away from him, but he kept one hand on their shoulder. “But I do need to know what happened. Is the Octarian…”

“She is fine, too. Now.” Eight’s face darkened. They looked around, over Three’s shoulders, and their gaze came to a rest on Topsail. They jumped backward, their hands reaching for the weapon holstered to their waist—was that another shooter? “Who is that!?”

“Hey, Eight, chill!” Three stepped between them and Topsail, his hands raised. “He’s with me. Friend of Four’s. I brought him ‘cause we had no idea what happened to you and the Octarian. Thought I might need a translator, in case you…weren’t around.”

Topsail took a few wary steps forward, thinking it best to not hide in the shadows. Eight scrutinized him and his skin crawled. “Hey,” he said, hoping his casualness didn’t sound as forced as it was. “I’m Topsail.”

Eight dipped their head. “I am Agent Eight. It is a pleasure.” Then they straightened back up. **“How long have you been topside?”**

Hearing his native language spoken at him made Topsail’s brain switch gears without his input. **“A while,”** he murmured after a pause.

Eight raised their eyebrows, their curiosity clearly piqued, but turned back to Three, whose eyes were darting to each Octoling as they spoke. “Anyways, yes, she is fine. There was a…” They worried their lip with their teeth for a moment. “An…error? A malfunction? With her brain?”

Three stiffened, like Eight’s words had physically hit him, and Topsail bristled on reflex too. Guardedly, Three asked, “Eight, what does that mean?”

“Exactly what you think.”

Three groaned something under his breath that sounded a lot like _oh, fuck me_.

Topsail knew he was not on the same page as the two agents and resented his lack of knowledge, but he’d grill someone, probably Maya, about it later. For now, he pointed to the metal cylinder. “Is she—the Octarian,” oh that felt very weird to say, “still in there?”

Eight nodded, visibly relieved that the subject had changed. “Yes. She is no longer malfunctioning, but she is still not…good. We have spoken a little, but she does not want to disclose many information about herself.”

Now that Topsail had approached Eight, he could peer into the mouth of the metal tube. He wasn’t entirely sure what he expected to see, maybe more glowing rings like Eight’s bioluminescence, but instead he only saw neon green streaks, very much like his. And nearly drowning out the faint glow of the green was an enormous blob of some teal goopy substance, creating so much light it backlit the head of the Octarian in question, crumpled motionless against the inner wall of the cylinder.

Topsail’s stomach turned. He tore his gaze away, as if even looking had burned him, and fought not to hiss as his shoulder flared again.

“When the malfunction happened, she ran away,” Eight was explaining to a stone-faced Three. “She usually will at least listen to me, but she did not when the…the… _it_ took over. I had to follow her before she got hurt.”

Three grunted. “And I guess that’s how you lost these?” He jabbed a thumb in Topsail’s direction, who stared blankly back at him before he remembered. He fumbled for the headphones around his neck.

“Oh! Yes, I knew they fell off, but I could not stop to pick them up. I would have lost her. I didn’t even have time to grab my roller, only this instead.” They indicated the gun holstered at their hip with some distaste. Then they folded up on themself, met Three’s eyes with a sheepish anxiety that didn’t seem congruent with Maya’s assertion that they were the most competent agent of them all. “I did not think about how you would not be able to contact me without the headset. I am sorry, Three.”

“’S fine,” Three muttered, waving them off. “As long as you and her are both safe…relatively. Do you think she’ll comply if we ask her to go back to the cabin?”

Eight gave Topsail a quick nod of thanks as he handed them the headphones. His neck felt so exposed now, and now he was the only one cut off from Maya’s “ground control.” The thought didn’t settle very well.

“Maybe,” Eight said, “if we are very patient. She does not want to stay here, in this dome, no more than we do, but…she is an elite. Elites are very, very prideful.”

Three snorted. “I have no problems knocking her down a couple pegs if she thinks her pride is more important than her life. Bring her out.”

**“YOU!”**

It all happened at once. The Octoling burst from the opening, clawed hands open and reaching for Three. Eight threw themself in front of her as Three leaped away. He landed in front of Topsail, his back to him, one arm outstretched as if to tell him to stay back, or sweep him behind. His other hand aimed his shooter, his trigger finger trembling.

 **“The Inkling menace!”** the rogue Octoling snarled. Eight had an inch on her and was using it well, spreading their arms as if to block Three from her sight entirely. **“Our armies in pieces! Our king fallen from grace! All at his hand!”** She glowered at Eight, who stood their ground, but Topsail saw the chill in her eyes and felt it resonate through his entire body. It took every ounce of willpower in him to not cower behind Three.

 **“Octavio didn’t have very far to fall,”** Eight huffed.

 **“Silence, traitor!”** the Octoling spat, lashing out only for Eight to seize her wrist. She pulled back and Eight released her, but she didn’t try again. **“You would ally yourself with our people’s greatest threat? How dare you even look me in the eyes, you double-crossing scum?”**

 **“Agent Three is my friend,”** Eight retorted. **“He’s done more for me than anyone in the army ever has. If it weren’t for him, we’d all still be stuck in these domes as they disintegrate around us.”**

 **“Don’t try to excuse your cowardice,”** the Octoling sniffed, but she did seem to be backing down, at least looking a little less like she’d tear Three limb from limb. **“Says a lot that you abandoned your people when the going got tough.”**

 **“It’s always been tough,”** Eight snapped. **“And it didn’t have to be! I abandoned a lifestyle that did nothing but beat me down—while you rolled over and took it. And, somehow, I’m the coward?”**

The Octoling’s lip curled in response, but she backed away from Eight, clutching a hand to her temple. Her ink was dark, a cool blue like Topsail’s or maybe even black. Her facial features were hard to see, given the continuing light from the pile of goo that sat perched upon the back of her left shoulder, but the silhouette of her face was rather angular, in a way that made her look emaciated. Topsail squeezed his eyes shut and looked away, but the teal had branded itself on the inside of his eyelids.

Three swallowed. “Are…Eight, are we good?”

Eight cast a quick glance over their shoulder. Their face was eerily blank. “Enough.”

Topsail didn’t find that very reassuring, but Three must have, as he dropped both his arms. His first instinct had been to protect Topsail…of course it was, though, Topsail was the only one here unarmed and incapable of defending himself. It just made logical sense. _Down, boy._

Eight was speaking to the Octoling again, this time much more quietly. **“Regardless of your feelings about Inklings, you’re safer up there than down here. Please, just work with us so we can help you. We’ve seen this kind of thing before and have an idea of what to do to fix it.”**

The Octoling returned their gaze with fifty times the venom, but if her hostility perturbed Eight, they didn’t show it. Instead they pivoted on their heel, turning their back on the stranger.

“Three?” they said in an airy voice. “Let’s go.”

“Uh. Yeah. Okay.” Three watched Eight stalk past, back toward the kettle. To Topsail’s surprise, the Octoling followed, though she kept her eyes glued to the ground. The pile of sludge on her shoulder jiggled with her steps.

Three brought up the rear, motioning for Topsail to stay beside him. He probably wanted to keep both Octolings in his sight at once. They had barely walked a few meters when the Octoling’s head snapped up, and she whirled around. Three took in a sharp breath and readied his shooter.

The Octoling ignored him entirely, locking eyes with Topsail. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. **“Have you been here this whole time?”** she hissed.

“Hey, back off,” Three warned, shouldering past Topsail to again be a physical barrier between them. The Octoling’s hands balled into trembling fists, and she released a burbling warning growl of her own.

“It’s—it’s okay, she wasn’t threatening me,” Topsail said, half-tempted to pull Three back by his shoulder but immediately thinking better of it. He didn’t like touching people, especially not when they were tense and armed. Three, thank the seas, heeded his words and dropped back a few steps. The Octoling’s steely gray eyes regarded him for only a moment more before turning back to Topsail. **“Yet another bottom-feeding traitor, I presume.”**

Despite himself, Topsail scoffed. **“You’re a decade too late to guilt trip me. I have never regretted coming to the surface, not for a second.”**

He’d expected her to keep ranting about his weakness and cowardice—he’d heard it all before—and it seemed like she was about to, at first. But then she shut her mouth so quickly her teeth clacked, and her glower melted away. She turned her back on him, more of a deliberate, haughty dismissal than an admission of defeat. He didn’t care either way, just glad she wasn’t going to start anything.

He fell back in line with Three, who made a noise that almost sounded like a chuckle. “What’d you say to shut her down like that?”

Had he finally done something to impress Three? Topsail quashed the thrill that ran through him with all his might _._ Out loud, he admitted, “I have no idea.”

Three shrugged, one hand on his earpiece. “Good news,” he muttered. “Found both Eight and the Octoling, no worse for wear. Heading back now.”

Maya’s voice was too distant for Topsail to catch any words, but he could tell just from her tone that she was her usual, optimistic self. That tiny normality comforted him, even in the face of everything else that had gone sideways today. He watched the teal goo bounce along on the shoulder of the Octarian in front of him and bit his tongue hard.

In a minute, he’d be back on the surface. He could leave this mechanical boneyard in the past where it belonged. Go back home, call out of work, sleep until the day’s events faded into a faint memory he could dismiss as a nightmare. He didn’t belong here, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these “agents” who took such an active stance in the safety of their city. He was not a hero, and this was not his fight.

 _No more of this._ He sent the words back in time, so they could reach the terrified Octoling child who had spent his first night in Inkopolis alone in a hospital bed. At least that terrified child might not recognize the lie for what it was.

The surface beckoned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally, 15k words in, we've introduced all the key players. more on eight and Mystery Octoling soon.
> 
> according to one of splat 2's sunken scrolls, callie decorated a lot of the octo canyon sectors herself, hence the stickers and graffiti and stuff that strikes me as, i dunno, somewhat antithetical to what we've seen of octarian culture. i didn't know that first writing this and i decided not to change it because topsail certainly wouldn't know that either. yeah it's these kinds of extremely minor details i get hung up on at the expense of everything else


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back. sorry i'm late. can't promise it won't happen again. pretty much the only thing i can get myself to do consistently is boot up animal crossing on a daily basis and even then that's not a guarantee lmao
> 
> i've been meaning to plug my [splatoon-centered twitter](https://twitter.com/plectronoceras) and kept forgetting so there it is, finally. i post squid-related art on a semi-regular basis there, and also links to updates of this very fic as it's my baby. you'll see art of characters who have yet to be formally introduced in writing so consider that your warning if it matters. 
> 
> stay safe out there. black lives matter. if you can, donate to organizations such as reclaim the block or the north star health collective, or a state bail fund. (i'd post links if i didn't think ao3 would axe them.)

Things were almost normal if one was somehow able to ignore the stifling tension in the room.

The cabin at the edge of the canyon was a combination NSS home base and Eight’s living quarters, and those two purposes bled into each other, sharing their space. A mini-fridge sat beside a roller propped up against the wall. Above them both, two wall-mounted racks, each containing a charger. Pieces of what had once been a weapon, a blaster maybe, and a screwdriver lay scattered across the twin-sized bed, hastily shoved in a corner. Beside it was a single power strip, charging a surprisingly nice-looking phone and an empty ink tank, its light flashing.

Eight had hurriedly swept the bed off and offered it to the Octoling— “Commander,” they had called her, and Topsail, for one, was glad to finally have something resembling a name to match to her face. And now that he’d been able to see her face in daylight, something about her just stuck to him, much like that alien pile of goo affixed to her shoulder. Her ink was dark blue, like his. Her chromatophores were beginning to fail in thin streaks, lines of silvery-gray spreading upward from the bases of her tentacles. Her bioluminescent patterns were like his, the green tips of the tentacles, not the much more common speckles or rings. Her skin was pale, though even paler than his own, somehow—the goo was likely to blame for her wan pallor. But, really, the similarities ended there. It was an eerie coincidence.

“Commander” had taken the bed she’d been offered, lay facing the wall with her back to the rest of them, but Topsail could tell by the way her ears twitched that she was fully conscious and listening hard. And now here he was, seated at this tiny table in the pseudo-kitchen area of the cabin, trying not to wilt under the stare of Agent Three.

“Okay,” Three said after sharing a long glance with Eight, to his left. He drummed his fingertips on the table as he spoke. “Let’s lay out what few facts we have, so everyone’s on the same page. Fact number one…” His eyes drifted between Eight and Topsail’s shoulders to the “sleeping” Commander behind them. “We’re fucked.”

“Inspiring,” Maya snorted, but her energy had flatlined since the others had returned from the underground. She slouched over the table, propping her head up with her right arm. “Seriously, though, I’m absolutely dead in the water right now. If any of you have information you’d like to share with the class, I’m all ears.”

Eight swallowed. They were the red to Commander’s blue, their ink an interesting pinkish-red and their skin a warm bronze. The right side of their head was shaved, their tentacles flopped over their left side, tips curling with their apprehension. They were dressed in gear similar to Three’s, but the black jacket they wore lacked both the stiff collar and fluorescent vest. They also sported fingerless gloves, which they plucked at as the gears visibly turned inside their head. Their eyes were round and an earthy hazel, and while one of them had similar sharp outward markings at the outside corners as Topsail, and Commander, the other was much more rounded off.

The silence dragged on for a few more awkward moments as they found their words and shot Three yet another nervous glance. “Three and I have…encountered this substance before. We do not know much details about it, just that it is…very dangerous.”

Maya sat up a little straighter. “Literally everything we’ve ever done as agents is ‘very dangerous.’ C’mon, spill.”

“They’re serious, Four. This stuff is…you can’t underestimate it.” Three rubbed his right eye with a fist as he spoke. Then he froze, and slowly lowered his arm as if he had just realized what he was doing. He let out a ragged breath. “I’ll tell you everything I know as long as you don’t ask how I know it, okay?”

“He says to two scientists,” Maya muttered, now flashing Topsail a look out of the corner of her eye. “But, fine, if only for your sake.”

Three tipped his chair back, tilting his head up and closing his eyes. Topsail refused to notice his jawline. “There’s a testing facility even further underground than the Octarian domes. Run by some ancient AI who wanted to create the perfect lifeform by taking the very best sapient beings and combining their genetic material into something…what’s the saying? More than the sum of its parts? That’s the shit that’s stuck to the Octoling.” He waved vaguely in Commander’s direction. “Eight and Cap can both verify.”

Eight shrank into themself at mention of their name, but Topsail and Maya shared a skeptical glance. “You’re telling me,” Maya said, grimacing around the words she spoke, “that this goo stuff is…genetic material? What does that even _mean,_ first of all—"

“It is a blended mixture of every test subject that came before me,” Eight mumbled, their eyes tracing the grains in the wooden table. “Over ten thousand individuals. The AI intended to eliminate all current life on the planet to ensure its creation had a niche in which it could thrive.”

Maya’s mouth opened and closed several times, but she said nothing. Topsail’s shoulder twinged, but he barely even noticed it over his stomach turning. “So you’re saying,” he said in as much of a careful, even tone as he could manage, “that this stuff is…a primordial ooze…made of digested corpses.”

“That’s disgusting,” Maya said, her voice awed and her eyes shining. “Oh my god, dude, imagine if we could get a sample—”

“Four, holy shit. Dial the ‘mad scientist’ thing back a little. This isn’t a joke.”

“Am I laughing?” Maya was, indeed, straight-faced, even as she elbowed Topsail. “Back me up, Mr. Biochemist. This stuff is _not_ just liquified bodies—with respect to the dearly departed. It’s…something is in it that makes it act like it’s still alive. That’s _huge!_ Think of all the scientific implications—"

“Four, _stop.”_ Three rubbed his temples, his right eye squeezed shut. “I respect the passion you have for your profession, but this is not the time. You were down there, you saw how much of it has infested the domes. And you saw what happened when it finds a host.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of Commander again. Reminded of the strange Octoling, Maya sobered instantly.

Topsail, meanwhile, clung to one detail that Three had so casually dropped. “Wait, there’s…a lot of it in the domes?”

Eight winced and Three gave him a grim nod. “Not every dome, but…a lot of them are compromised. Mostly the cities, too.”

As if reading Topsail’s mind, or maybe just catching on to his eyes widening, Eight jumped in, “The cities are abandoned. I believe the civilians evacuated some time ago…though we cannot say if the sanitization is the reason why. If there is anyone left down there, they are probably soldiers. The ones who take the military most serious.” They flicked their eyes to their side, again indicating Commander.

An awkward silence fell over the table, but as usual, Maya refused to let it linger. “So how do we get rid of this crap? Maybe if Eight splatted her…”

“You are quite welcome to try and convince her of that,” Eight snorted.

Three shook his head, tapping a finger on his chin. “I think the only reason that worked last time was because…it hadn’t been attached to me for too long. A few hours or so. But who knows how long it’s been stuck to her? It’s had plenty of time to sink its claws in.”

“Have we considered…” Topsail didn’t quite know how to broach this subject. “Surgical intervention?”

“Of course we have. It…it feels awful to say, but it is too risky. To her, yes, but mostly to us.” Eight chewed their lip as they spoke.

Three leaned forward, returning all the chair’s feet to the floor with a clunk. “Nothing we’ve discussed here today leaves the canyon. That includes seeking actual medical attention. We just don’t know enough about this to risk introducing it to all of Inkopolis. Or worse, make people investigate where it came from.”

Topsail wanted so badly to argue, do _something_ to alleviate the dense pit that had congealed in his guts at the thought of knowingly keeping this Octoling sick. But Three had a point, one he couldn’t imagine any way around. Maya was always better at this kind of problem-solving stuff, and she, too, was silent.

“It sucks, but I think she’ll be alright,” Three said, as if he were just musing to himself. “Honestly, she’s holding up way better than I did. Maybe ‘cause the stuff isn’t so close to her brain. I was…” He gave a short bark of laughter, unsmiling. “A monster.”

Eight, their face twisted in concern, reached out and placed a clawed hand on Three’s shoulder. A pang of envy did not race through Topsail, nor did he dig his own claws into his knee as punishment.

“This is only going to get worse, Three.” Maya’s face was dark, devoid of her usual humor. “That ‘monster’ is going to come out more and more frequently—and the last time it did, I about got my arm blown off! She’ll mow us all down if we don’t watch ourselves.” She squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her fingers into her temple. “You said an underground testing facility is where this all originated. Do you think…?”

“There’s no cure. Not down there, not anywhere.” Three’s tone was as light and warm as steel.

Eight swallowed, and their voice had the slightest tremor when they spoke. “Fully sanitized Octarians have no vitals. There is no going back.”

“Three seems fine to me, ocular damage aside.” Maya artfully ignored the miffed look the agent in question shot her. “I think it’s a fair assumption that this stuff used to be confined to your ‘testing facility.’ Unless any of you saw it in the domes before now.”

“It is certainly not an Octarian thing,” Eight said. Then their brow furrowed. “I…I think. I do not remember seeing it when I was…but I do not remember a lot of things about that life.”

All eyes turned to Topsail, who tried not to show how his hearts picked up speed. “I, uh…yeah, this is news to me, too. Ten years ago the Octarian domes were goo-free, as far as I know. But I don’t know much, either.” Two truths and a lie. Maybe they’d balance each other out.

“So it’s only recently that this stuff has escaped the facility, when it’s been down there who knows how long.” Maya was using her academic voice, the one more suited to a presentation than a whispered conspiracy around this tiny table in Octo Canyon. “It tracks that the facility probably has some way to contain it, right? It must have some weakness to exploit. We just have to find it.”

The other two agents exchanged yet another glance, but this time they seemed to be on different pages, Eight’s eyebrows raised in interest and Three on the precipice of scowling.

“We can’t go back down there.” Three’s face held its sternness as he spoke, so maybe Topsail had just imagined the tiniest of wavers in his voice.

“Cap’n Cuttlefish visits the metro all the time,” Eight replied with a minute shrug of their shoulders.

“Cap doesn’t _leave_ the metro. He doesn’t do a damn thing down there besides ride it around and shoot the shit with the other passengers. He _especially_ doesn’t fuck with anything relating to Kamobo.”

“Then someone should!” Eight leaned forward, a challenge glimmering in their eyes. “Four is right. Kamobo is the only place we may be able to find answers. Without, we have nothing, and…we cannot settle for that. It is not fair to her.”

“Fair?” Three repeated in a tone that would have been scathing had he not sounded genuinely confused. “What does fairness have to do with—we all almost _died!_ Did you forget that you almost got blended into—” here he waved a hand in the vague direction of Commander. “Did you forget that I came _this_ close to—”

“But did you?” Eight sat back again, their shoulders squared and their head held high. “It could have gone badly, yes, but I will not let that stop me. I am not afraid to go back if that is what needs to be done.”

“I’m _not_ afraid!” Three slammed his palms on the table as he stood up so quickly his chair tipped over backward. Topsail risked a quick glance at Maya and took a selfish kind of relief in seeing his alarm mirrored in her face.

Eight apparently hadn’t expected this outburst, either, if the way they leaned back slightly was any indication. They held their hands up, palms facing him. “That was not what I—”

_“Fuck,_ Eight, think about what happened down there! It’s too dangerous, we can’t…” He trailed off, his eyes darting to all the faces gathered around the table. Despite himself, Topsail felt something akin to an electric shock when Three’s eyes met his own, and again sank his claws into his leg.

Three didn’t _relax_ per se, but he did settle, bringing a fist up to his mouth as he cleared his throat. “Sorry,” he mumbled around it, then ducked away to set his chair back upright.

The tension dissipated, Eight turned to Maya, and Topsail by association, their tentacles swaying leisurely with the motion. “We will not make Three return there if he does not want to,” they said quietly. “And while I will do it, I would…rather not go alone. I am aware that you are…not in the best condition.”

“Hey, just put me in a sling or something. I’ll be fine.” Maya’s usual upbeat smile seemed strained somehow, and Eight picked up on it too, giving a tiny shake of their head in response.

Three’s head emerged from under the table. “I’ll go, Eight. Us two are the only ones who have a fighting chance down there.” Eight began to protest and he swept on, “That didn’t happen. I’m good. I’m cool. The safety of Inkopolis is what matters.”

“Three, dude. Come on. That was…” Whatever Maya was about to say next, she didn’t get the chance. She trailed off, staring at Topsail. Three’s eyes followed hers, and widened. Eight twisted around in their chair, a wince already on their face.

Topsail felt a presence mere inches behind him and allowed himself the slightest grimace.

Eight cleared their throat. **“Apologies if we woke you, Commander…”**

**“You did.”**

Bullshit, Topsail thought, he’d seen how she was straining to hear their conversation from across the room. But then again, he hadn’t been paying her any attention over the past several minutes—which was why she now loomed over him, breathing down his neck—and she was ex-military, she could probably fall asleep in basal form, clinging to a wall, under splatling fire.

Three stood again, pushing his chair back slowly enough that it didn’t fall over this time. “We should take this outside.” His tone was even, nonchalant almost, and his face unreadable.

Maya mumbled an agreement and rose from her seat as well, not very subtly shooting a look over Topsail’s shoulder. His skin prickled—how close to him was Commander standing?

He, too, made an effort to scoot his chair away, but she clapped a hand on its back and he cringed. “ **You. Stay. I want to talk to you.”**

_Why me?_ He swallowed, and said aloud, **“You’re much more likely to get decent information from Eight—”**

**“Don’t question me.”**

He shot a panicked glance at Eight, who had also gotten up to leave, though they had frozen where they stood and sized Commander up, their eyes narrowed.

**“Go on.”** She waved her hand in their direction, and though their tentacles shivered, they met Topsail’s eyes and gave a nearly imperceptible apologetic shrug before turning on their heel.

The ten seconds it took the agents to leave the little cabin were possibly the longest seconds of Topsail’s life. The door closed.

She stepped back a meter or so, the soles of her boots clunking against the hardwood. **“Stand. Face me.”**

Part of Topsail burned at being ordered around like this, like he was just a child, but the part of him that _was_ still a shellshocked child made him obey without question. He took his time getting up, though, and in opposition to his ingrained military instincts, relaxed himself as much as he could when the atmosphere in the cabin was still so suffocating. Commander had two inches on him, and that sucked, but he didn’t dare show it as he locked eyes with her, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans.

Past the two-second mark, however, the extended eye contact became a _huge_ problem. He threw the match, his eyes darting away, something in his gut contorting.

**“You’re not military material.”**

**“No shit,”** he snorted, remembering a second too late who he was talking to.

**“I see why you left.”** Finally, _finally,_ she pulled her eyes away from his face, and they came to rest on his hip. Her claws reached out and snatched the work badge that hung from his belt loop, pulling the zipline it was attached to. He backed up too late, bumping into the back of the chair and wincing at the impact. She either didn’t notice or care, squinting at the card contained in its plastic holder.

**“If you wanted my name, you could have asked.”** That was the only information on his badge that would matter to her, he reasoned. Granted, the text was in Inkling, but Octarian and Inkling were more closely related languages than either species would like to admit. Even their alphabets were similar. She could probably piece together something coherent just by recognizing the letters.

**“Topsail,”** she said after a moment, and he tried not to tense up, hearing his name through an Octarian accent when he was so used to the Inkling version. He only tended to hear it from one person in particular…and Commander was not her, not even close. She released his badge from her fingers and it went flying up the line, snapping back to his hip. **“Is that your real name?”**

**“Yes?”** What, did she think he’d lied to the place that signed his paychecks? Anyone who went digging for his old name had no business knowing it.

**“Human in origin, is it not?”** she mused. **“Certainly neither Inkling nor Octarian.”**

Now he brought his eyes back to her, making a show of quirking an eyebrow. The last time he’d thought this hard about his name was when he was choosing it. **“Uh…yes. Think it’s an old nautical term.”**

She forced some air through her nose. It would have been an almost-laugh had she smiled even a little bit. **“Your parents were creative.”**

**“What do you want from me?”** As soon as the words left his mouth, he began to think he maybe shouldn’t snap at an Octarian military elite like this. But he didn’t have much capacity for being social at the best of times, and now especially his brain was spinning its wheels and getting nowhere, draining his energy and his patience.

Her eyes narrowed, and his organs plummeted, the instinctual thrill of panic like when he missed a step on a flight of stairs. _Stupid, stupid, stupid—_

He waited for her to speak, to rightfully admonish him for being rude, to an army commander no less, and then he caught himself. He wasn’t underground anymore, those scraps of seaweed entangled in her tentacles didn’t mean a damn thing up here. The two of them were on equal footing. He would not offer deference, not this time. Still, steadying his breathing before he spoke was more of a challenge than it should have been. **“You hurt Ma—Agent Four.”**

Her brows furrowed, more in confusion than in irritation, he thought. **“The Inkling girl?”** At his nod, she rolled her eyes. **“If I hadn’t, she’d look like me. You’re welcome.”**

Before he could reply, she continued with a scowl, **“If I wanted her to die, she’d be dead. If I wanted her hurt, she wouldn’t still have that arm. This disgusting sludge—”** she rolled her shoulder and made the substance in question undulate, **“cannot hope to override thirty years of sharpshooting experience. I saved her life by doing what I did.”**

Topsail had no response, formulating half-sentences that died before they could reach his tongue. The goo stared him down with more intensity than the person it was attached to, and unbidden memories were floating to the surface, before his very eyes. **“How much control does it have over you?”** he managed at last.

**“Less than you think. When it flares, I fight it, and I have not lost.”**

_Yet,_ Topsail managed to restrain himself from growling. But then…he eyed the slime on her shoulder blade, counted the inches it would have to travel up her neck to reach her head. For once he welcomed the reflexive pang in his shoulder, a shallow twinge that was gone as soon as it came. It had only grazed him, spread thin over a wide surface area. He’d come out of it with superficial chemical burns and a decade of baggage, but at least it hadn’t wormed its way into his mind, the way it had…someone else. The way it must have done to Three. The way it was trying to do to Commander, as they spoke. Maybe Three had a point about its influence being weaker the further away it was from the brain.

**“But speaking of the girl.”** Commander now stared out the window over Topsail’s shoulder. He twisted around, but didn’t see anyone through the tiny slice of the canyon the window provided. He could only assume the agents were just out of sight.

**“What about her?”** he said sharply. He was aware he was too defensive, too disrespectful, riding on the ragged edge of Commander’s goodwill, but he’d throw their tentative truce to the wind in a heartbeat for Maya’s sake.

**“She got shot, child.”** Commander gave him an incredulous look, her forehead wrinkling. **“It was not a fully-charged shot, but it was enough to do some damage. Hasn’t she been treated? Did no one make sure she isn’t concussed from the fall? Or do your friends the Inklings just not care about the well-being of their prized ‘agents’?”**

Topsail couldn’t answer, his eyes flicking around the room as if his surroundings could provide him what she wanted to hear. He didn’t know for sure what had happened to Maya, or what she or anyone had done about it—and that was damning in and of itself. And hadn’t Three just said whatever happened in the underground stayed here? He imagined telling her, “I don’t know, but probably not,” would fly about as well as a curling bomb.

He didn’t have to, though, because his silence was more than enough. She scoffed. **“These idiots should never have won the war.”**

She turned on her heel and stalked back to Eight’s bed, dropping to her knees and fishing around beneath it. When she rose to her feet again, she was holding a gun.

By some miracle, Topsail managed to not obey his instincts, which were to scramble under the table for cover. But he flinched hard when Commander swung around to face him. It was probably a charger, given its length. He wasn’t very familiar with the further classifications, but this one looked like a more specialized type, made of narrow metal piping and bulkier yellow pieces, unlike the standard guns he’d seen in the hands of turf-warring Inklings. Certainly more dangerous than them, too. Its reservoir, he noted not without relief, looked empty.

He failed to keep the stammer out of his voice. **“Wh—what are you doing with that?”**

**“The domes have the medical technology you clearly lack.”**

**“The domes also have…that.”** He motioned vaguely at her shoulder.

**“Which is why I’m bringing this.”** She lifted her weapon, then slung it around her shoulders and strode to the wall to Topsail’s left. The next thing he knew, she’d chucked one of the chargers at him, the one with blue accents rather than green. He scrambled to catch it.

**“You’re coming with,”** she said.

**“The hell I am!”** He hadn’t so much as touched a weapon in months, but his hands slid exactly into place on the underside of the charger he now wielded, and he hated it. Did she somehow know that chargers were technically his best weapon, which meant the one he was only mediocre with instead of abysmal, or was that just a lucky guess on her part?

**“You are. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t need someone to watch my back, but the way things are…I cannot afford another mistake.”** She didn’t even look at him, busying herself with unplugging the ink tank at the bedside.

Topsail already burned at the words before they left his mouth. **“Bringing me along** ** _is_ a mistake. I can’t…I’m not…” **Yet, despite the truthfulness of his words, his voice failed him, refusing to disclose this secret to a stranger who already thought so little of him.

**“Instead of being so defeatist, child…why don’t you take the opportunity to learn?”** Commander grit her teeth as she inserted the ink tank into her siphon, but it almost looked like a grin. She had an odd tooth formation, three oversized fangs clustered together on her bottom jaw. Blue dribbled into the glass container.

Topsail had half a mind to be irritated at her talking down to him, but much like his continued protesting, his insistence that he was _not_ the guy for this job, he couldn’t choke it out. Why was it so hard to convince people of his own incompetence? And why was it so hard to admit it even when he knew it was true?

While he fought the words that stuck inside his throat, something in the room changed. Commander’s head snapped upward. The goo, perched on her rigid shoulder, quivered like it was being shaken from the inside. Her breathing came in ragged huffs, even though she hadn’t been doing anything but standing still.

Just as Topsail began to put the pieces together, she bolted out the door.

For the first time in his life, his brain stilled and his body moved without being commanded by his thoughts.

There was an ink tank lying beside the roller against the wall. He snatched it by one of its straps, shouldered it as he burst through the door, leaving it wide open behind him. A trail of blue ink led further into Octo Canyon. His body melted into the splatter, dissolving completely only to reform in the air as he dove into the next. Long-range charger shots, easy path to follow. Voices reached him, shouts from the agents on the other side of the clearing, but they were distant and his basal form’s middling auditory senses garbled whatever words he may have caught. He didn’t listen.

The spiraling rocks passed above him in blurs as he leaped from streak to streak. Even he had to admit that there was something satisfying, exhilarating even, about pulling off these speedy jumps. But damn, Commander was fast—she’d had a barely-three-second head start and he was still eating her dust. How deep into Octo Canyon had she gone?

How deep into Octo Canyon was _he?_

His brain back online, he slowed and popped out of the ink trail, returning to upright form just to feel his two feet on solid ground again. He’d bypassed the sector he’d been before; no colorful stickers slapped against glass windows here. Everything was metal ramps and walls, ink-proof surfaces sprouting out of the rock like weeds. Each step he took sent him tumbling back into the robotic, sterile halls that haunted his earliest memories.

Here he was, an idiot with a charger he could barely use, a _dropout,_ chasing a decorated sniper with some substance made of dead people eating her mind, into the remnants of an abandoned civilization, alone.

“What the fuck am I doing?” he breathed aloud. The breeze whistling through the empty canyon ripped the flimsy words to pieces.

“Hold up!” came a second voice from behind him, punctuated by the _rat-a-tat_ of gunfire and the resulting splats of ink against the ground. He turned, seeing at first just a flash of green before Three reformed upright beside him, shooter in hand, squinting out at the rest of the canyon that loomed before them. Topsail followed his gaze, his eyes tracing the wet trails carved against the cement and metal, glistening in the sunlight. Unconsciously, he lifted the barrel of the charger a few inches, his claws bending inward against the gun as he squeezed it too tight. The sleeve of his lab coat slipped down his forearm as he raised it.

In lieu of speaking, Three snatched Topsail’s wrist. On instinct Topsail recoiled, his hearts shooting into his throat and blocking his airway, but Three held him fast. His brow furrowed in concentration, the lower eyelid of his scarred eye twitching for just a moment, and then the new color darkened his tentacles, sweeping upward from their bases. Topsail stilled.

_You look good in my blue._ The thought took him off guard even worse than the contact had. But now that it had taken shape in his brain, he was free to imagine stuffing it into an iron maiden and flinging the whole goddamn thing out to sea, giving it the watery grave it deserved.

Three released him. “Sorry,” he grunted. Whether for the surprise or the touch, Topsail couldn’t quite discern. Some feeling was slithering around in his gut, a close relative to the anxiety that had shadowed him the moment his hearts had first started to beat, but…not quite what he was used to. His wrist where Three had touched him was buzzing. Nothing about the interaction had been pleasant, so why did he almost want it to happen again?

(he knew, he knew, he _knew,_ but even acknowledging it to himself made it much too real, so as always, he took the coward’s way out)

“We gotta go.” Three’s low voice sliced through his personal tempest, revealing not sun and blue skies beyond, but more rain, just from a different direction. Still, Topsail would do just about anything to tear himself from his own head. He didn’t trust his voice, so he nodded, wearing the disaffected coolness like an appropriative costume.

Three took a running dive into the next long stripe of blue ink, and Topsail followed, abandoning his cacophonous thoughts in the dirt of Octo Canyon.


	6. Chapter 6

The Octarian civilian dome was a graveyard. Nothing more, nothing less. Chills raced down Topsail’s arms at the atmosphere, the cold, stale air, the multi-story buildings reaching up for a sky that was not there. They trapped him, penned him in. The streetlights were dead, and so were two thirds of the panels that made up the “sky.” The remaining panels glowed an eerie, harsh white, glaring down on the two intruders with all the intensity of the sun and none of the warmth.

Three had taken a few steps ahead, scouring the ground for more fresh ink. The lights drew hard shadows across his face, almost washing out his skin, as he turned to Topsail behind him. “Full disclosure. We found her in this same dome last night. And the sanitization goo’s down here, too.”

Topsail’s blood ran cold despite all three of his hearts beating twice as fast. Three _had_ said most of the civilian domes were contaminated…he must not have concealed his fear very well, as Three averted his eyes. “Look, this isn’t your job. I’m not gonna ask you to…do something this risky. ‘Specially since you’re not trained and all.”

“You don’t have to sugarcoat it for my sake.” And that came out _way_ too defensive again. Topsail resisted the urge to clap his palm against his forehead and did his best to ignore the heat rushing to his face. “Okay, what I mean is—if you think I’m a liability, and you’d honestly be right to, I’ll go, just say the word. But I…” _Don’t want to leave you here alone._ “I, uh…think this is a bad time for a solo mission.”

Three sized him up and his skin prickled—he could only pray his cheeks weren’t as blue as he feared they were. Then Three gave a shrug that was far too nonchalant for the cold, empty buildings surrounding him like insurmountable walls. “Just giving you an out if you wanted one. Can’t imagine you’d _want_ to be back down here, with all this shit happening. But I’m not gonna tell you to fuck off. Could use an extra eye to watch my six.”

 _He doesn’t think I’m useless._ Topsail was not proud of how much that thought comforted him.

“Besides, now that we’re ink-matched, it doesn’t matter how bad of a shot you are. And Eight and Four aren’t answering.” Three tapped one side of his headset, scowling. “Either the signal down here is crap or they’re both AFK, and they shouldn’t be, but either way you’re all I’ve got.”

Those last four words rattled around in Topsail’s brain despite his best efforts to leash it. The pressure mounted—now Three was counting on him, Three trusted him to keep him safe—he couldn’t do that, he _couldn’t,_ he just plain and simple did not have those skills—but Three thought he was better than nothing. And Topsail wanted more than anything else to believe that himself. He squeezed the charger in his hands, his hearts pounding for a different reason now, rendered immobile by the war his brain waged on him.

Three didn’t notice, striding forward and holding a hand up to his face to shade his eyes. “Course she wouldn’t leave a trail that leads us straight to her, that would be too easy. You got an idea of where she’s going?”

 _Move, idiot, say something._ “Y-yeah, actually,” he said, and Three whipped around, surprise written all over his face. “We…talked. She said she has more control over it than we think—” Three scoffed— “and I’m inclined to believe her. She _wanted_ to come down here again, she…I don’t know, she seemed like she was worried about Maya.” And, hell, he was too. “She was under the impression she’d find more adequate medical supplies here in the domes. I guess the…the goo just…took off with her body, after she’d made up her mind.”

Three chewed on this for a while, tapping his fingers against the casing of his shooter. “How altruistic of her,” he said at last, his tone flat enough that he sounded a touch sarcastic. “Don’t let your guard down.”

Topsail almost asked, “for what,” but kept his mouth shut. He’d choose to believe Three meant the goo, and was not implying that Commander was leading them into a trap. What good would that do her, anyway? Ignoring his logic, his skin crawled beneath the fluorescent lights.

They walked. Despite himself, Topsail gawked around at the surrounding city like he had never seen it before. This almost could have been any block in Inkopolis if it weren’t so dead, inside and out. And that was in part what made him want to shudder. He’d been in a civilian dome before—he was born in one, after all—but he certainly didn’t remember it, or any dome besides the one he’d grown up in. A cold, heavy feeling settled in his stomach. Commander had no place being in that facility, he told himself, there was no reason she’d go there. There was no reason he’d have to revisit it himself.

Three broke the silence. “I don’t know where she’s expecting to find anything useful down here. Unless she’s gonna raid a pharmacy or something.”

“I…won’t pretend I’m an expert, but…if she was down here before, this dome is probably her home base.” It did seem like an especially large dome, even if most of its paneled sky was swallowed by darkness. “I’d be willing to bet there’s a military base nearby, either within this same dome or connected to it. Not all the domes have kettle-connections to the surface, so…”

Three grunted. “Don’t suppose you’d know where this alleged base would be.”

“No…” _Didn’t take long to start being useless again,_ the bitterest part of his brain hissed.

Three, however, shrugged. “Expected as much. Tracking her down’s the fun part.” He was still so deadpan, Topsail couldn’t tell if he was being facetious. “Keep an eye out for anything weird.”

He did. But other than the sinister emptiness of the city blocks, other than the failing power, nothing was out of the ordinary. Which in itself was weird. Topsail’s overactive anxiety insisted that an ambush was imminent, but the lifelessness of this place ached inside him at the same time. What did he expect, breaking into what might as well have been a tomb?

He’d turned around, walking backward, after remembering that his whole purpose in being down here was to watch Three’s back. But nothing was sneaking up on them. When he turned back, Three was facing him, an eyebrow raised.

“You do know your tank’s dry?”

Oh. Right. In all the excitement, Topsail had neglected to actually hook the ink system up to himself. He came to a slow stop, resting the bottom of his charger’s reservoir on the top of his foot, leaning it against him. This freed up a hand that he used to grope around for the tank’s connector.

Three had moved on, but the atmosphere, and the nonzero chance that something dangerous would make its move while he was incapacitated, did not make it easy for Topsail to relax. He’d always had a hell of a time making his siphon form, even without the outside pressure. So he was used to giving up and forcing the connector in.

The sting of pain that shot through his dorsal nerve and tingled in the back of his brain reminded him too late why that was a stupid idea. He bit down hard on the noise it drew from him, but it still slipped through his teeth. Three was too far ahead to hear, he was sure, and hopefully he wouldn’t turn back around to see Topsail flushed bluer than the ocean.

He’d at least gotten the damn thing in, though. Minor victories. The ink that left his body, pooling at the bottom of his tank, made him shiver despite his layers, despite the temperate air of the dome. He took larger steps to catch up to Three.

“You help yourself to the NSS weapon stash?”

Well, now there was certainly no blood in his face at all, even though Three didn’t sound nearly as accusatory as he could have. “I, uh, well—she kinda just…took this off the wall and threw it at me, told me I was coming with. I…she didn’t take no for an answer…” God, could he sound any more pathetic? Why didn’t he just own it instead of offering excuses?

“You’re just lucky you didn’t take the other charger, is all. If anything happened to that thing, Agent Two would kill everyone in Inkopolis and then herself.”

Topsail could only assume it was a joke, but jokes that specific always held some grain of truth to them…and Three’s impassivity was not giving him any clues. More importantly, though…Agent Two? As much as his curiosity gnawed at him, he knew better than to ask. His line of work had taught him to be grudgingly, and temporarily, accepting of non-answers. Or maybe this was another thing to ask Maya about…assuming he lived to see the surface again.

His ears twitched at a noise behind him. Almost like trickling water, like a gentle rain hitting the asphalt. But there was no rain, no snow, no precipitation at all, in the underground. He turned, all his trigger discipline out the window, aiming the charger at…nothing. The vacant streets mocked his paranoia. With rising dread, he craned his neck upward, to the looming buildings.

“Three!” he choked out, his voice cracking.

The agent’s shoes scuffed against the pavement as he turned. “Aw, hell—don’t shoot! You could knock it off, right on top of you!”

Topsail’s trigger finger itched, but he ignored all his instincts and lowered the barrel. The pile of teal ooze affixed to the wall above him was pulsating, tiny flecks of it leaving its “body” and hitting the ground beneath, creating the drumming noise he’d heard. They left coin-sized puddles on the sidewalk.

“The good news is, when it’s not somehow being directly controlled by a genocidal AI, it’s super slow. You can outwalk it without even trying. And that’s what we’re gonna do.”

It wasn’t that it moved slowly, Topsail thought, blood roaring in his ears. It was that it just _appeared._ That was how it got the jump on--

His feet moved on their own, sending him backward as fast as possible without him falling on his ass. He kept his eyes glued to the splotch of teal, a garish ink splatter against the metal exterior of the building, and only dared to look away when he thought he might back into Three if he didn’t. Still, showing his back to the enemy made his tentacles writhe.

No further words passed between the two of them as they weaved across the streets and sidewalks, ducked into and out of alleyways, each colder and emptier than the last. Their path followed no rhyme or reason, so either Three knew they were being followed and was trying to lose their pursuer, or he had absolutely no idea where he was going…and each time Topsail’s jumpiness got the better of him and he allowed himself a wary glance backward, there was nothing there. Not a trace of the goo, not so much as a single sign of life anywhere.

Except…

Topsail came to a stop at the glistening trail of blue ink splashed against the shaded side of this building. A perfectly vertical shot, probably from overhead, the building opposite this alley, as now he noticed a thin layer of ink across the asphalt before him, angled perpendicular to the wall. The edges were disintegrating, the airborne bacteria that wrote Topsail his paychecks working their magic. Maybe ten minutes old, fifteen at the most. _Have we already been down here that long?_ Beneath this paneled sky, these broken lights, the passage of time slowed to a standstill. Topsail had already lost over half his life to it.

He aimed the gun and squeezed the trigger.

Three whipped around at the noise, ears well-attuned to the signature crack of a charger shot. Topsail paid him no attention, too preoccupied with watching his own splash of ink trickle down the wall, crossed over the previous mark in a lopsided kind of X pattern. Where the two lines intersected, he couldn’t tell where Commander’s ended and his began. The knockback of the charger hummed in his hands. The vacuum of the ink tank on his back tugged gently at its connection to his body, and he bit his tongue as it drew more from his siphon to replenish the loss.

By now Three had doubled back, stood beside Topsail, but not too close, to admire the two connected stripes of ink painted on the wall. “Good eye. Didn’t even notice that.”

He rocked back on his heel for a moment and then flung himself into the wall, melting into ink just before he slammed face-first into the brick. He scaled the wall, using Topsail’s charger shot to reach the more vertical path up the building, where he popped out on the roof. Stray flecks of ink rained down around Topsail, and he flinched at the assault before he remembered he and Three were ink-matched. _Oh my god, we’re ink-matched._

In an effort to quash the fluttery feeling in his stomach, he threw himself at the wall, too, and took a sense of comfort he’d never had before in the sensation of everything around him melting away. But it only lasted as long as his travel through the ink. When he reformed solid on the roof beside Three, the world adjusted and he did not—he staggered, thankfully too far away from the edge to risk toppling off the building. Still, Three jerked his head at the audibly clumsy landing, and Topsail burned.

The city rooftops spread out before the two of them, a topographic map of gray squares and rectangles cut by rivers of blue ink. No teal green in sight. The path was not straight, veered off to the right with each progressing building, finally falling through a crack between two of them and not emerging again.

Three was smiling, a wide, sharp-toothed kind of grin that didn’t strike Topsail as particularly genuine…not that it stopped a jolt of some white-hot feeling from surging up through his stomach and chest. “Didn’t take her for the hardcore parkour type, but I’m into it.”

 _That makes one of us._ Topsail tried not to eye the drop down to the next rooftop with too much apprehension. “Shall we?” he asked, imagining the casual bravado with which he spoke smashing his nerves into pieces. If only.

“Hell yeah.” Three backed up a few paces and took a running dive over the edge, shrinking into squid form in midair. He connected with the ink on the next roof and swam away, the only indication of his movement being small ripples across the surface. Topsail steeled himself. Before he could lose Three, or talk himself out of doing this, he, too, took the plunge.

It was remarkable how…easy it was to fly along these ink trails, once he got started. Something deep inside him, some quiet but insistent tugging in his brain, pulled him toward the friendly ink without him having to look for it, or even think about it. He glided through, leaping the gaps between buildings like it was nothing. Even when they were spaced too far apart to jump, the way he hit the ground with a solid _smack_ but felt no pain was in itself satisfying, and a moment later he’d dissolve himself into the ink pathways again. Maybe he should do this more often, make more of an effort to connect himself to his basal form, to his ancient ancestors…

A garbled shout from ahead made him lose his shape. Half-formed, a tangle of tentacles and opaque, dry skin, he somersaulted across the next roof. The shock made him reform in full—dammit, he needed to practice more—the charger developed in his hands before they even had fingers. A second later, it was gone, skidding across the roof and plummeting over the edge. It hit the ground below with a clatter.

Fully upright again, he sat up, fixing his glasses from where they’d regrown off-center on his face. With the world back in focus, he saw a streak of blue fly up from over the edge, the telltale waves of something swimming within it surging along with its movement. Three popped out on the top of the building, several feet above Topsail, weapon in hand. He caught Topsail’s eye and narrowed his own, waving the barrel of his shooter vaguely down below.

Topsail crept to the edge and inhaled sharply. There, on the asphalt, was his charger…surrounded by massive piles of teal goo. Each dwarfed the one he’d seen before, about as long as he was tall, and four of them were crammed into this narrow alley.

He glanced back up toward Three, unable to hide the fear that warped his expression. In a last-ditch attempt to save face, he did the only thing he could think of doing, and mouthed, _what the fuck?_

Three shrugged and then swung the gun around, pointing it at the sludge pile on the farthest end of the alley. Topsail squinted. Something sat in the center of the teal puddle, unnaturally round and glinting in the dome’s harsh light. The goo had split around it, as if trying to engulf it, but the grated top of the object was still exposed.

This wasn’t normal “goo” behavior, was it? The attempted phagocytosing of this kettle…Three certainly would know more about it than Topsail would, but before he could even form the words in his brain, he felt the agent in question’s eyes on him.

Thankfully, rather than aim the shooter right at him, Three instead used his free hand to point. First at Topsail, then slowly, deliberately, dragging away from him to again indicate the abandoned charger in the alleyway. He pressed one finger against his lips.

_Fuck me sideways._

Three now pantomimed shooting at the goop from above and gave Topsail a thumbs-up. Okay, that made sense, and told Topsail it probably wasn’t a punishment for throwing his only weapon off the building—which, frankly, he deserved. But the knowledge that Three was covering him did not make it any easier to peer over the edge, at the mystery substance that had scarred him.

There were splatters of his blue ink on the ground and walls—Three hadn’t expected to dive right into the goop’s clutches, had freaked, and fired randomly before escaping to higher ground, Topsail theorized. It at least meant he could go basal and drop down safely, and more importantly _quietly._

_So my survival depends on my silence, and not standing out. Just like high school._

Despite the sweating of his palms, his shaking like a leaf under his layers, one last look from Three was all he needed to launch himself over the edge. He hit the puddle of friendly ink as an octopus, eyes closed, giving himself up to the impact that rode through him.

Well, he wasn’t dead yet. He cracked open an eye, the dark buildings swirling above him. That subtle nag deep in his brain told him approximately where the next ink patches were, but…the charger hadn’t landed in one, of course it hadn’t. He needed to round one of these goo piles to reach it.

He swam backward to build momentum and jumped, connected with a splash of ink on the wall, and banked off that at an angle to land back on the ground—dry, he realized too late. The _slap_ that rang out through the alley was the volume of a nuclear explosion.

He was upright and on his feet in an instant, backing himself into the wall. His hearts hammered at the confines of his chest. These things didn’t have faces, or even a “head” or a “tail” end, but it felt so much like they were all _looking_ at him…

Especially the one three feet to his right, guarding his charger beyond. He took in a shuddering breath and regretted it as he lapsed into a coughing fit—the _smell_ sent him places he’d never wanted to return. Even with his face buried in the crook of his elbow, he shot a glare at the nearest one, his skin crawling beneath its nonexistent gaze. He flattened himself against the wall as best he could, with the ink tank still strapped to his back, its rim biting him. The teal watched him, followed him as he skirted around it. Was he imagining his breath forming clouds in the air?

He did everything in his power to keep his distance, the scent alone enough to turn his stomach, but the damn thing had been creeping toward his charger the whole time, was within inches of enveloping it within its gelatinous body. He crouched low, slinked forward, arm outstretched and eyes on the enemy. It was definitely exuding a chill, though he knew that was not the reason for his trembling fingers. He tried not to look at the _things_ that floated inside the mass, told himself they couldn’t be organic, knew he was lying.

He tapped the chassis of the charger with a claw and spun it a few degrees out of his reach.

The goo approached. Like the waves of the ocean, one part of it rolled forward across the pavement, reaching out for him. Three was right, it was laughably slow, but it _knew_ Topsail was there. His eyes watered. The pads of his fingers brushed the very bottom of the charger’s grip, and he pulled it toward him, millimeter by millimeter.

The goo settled itself over the very tip of the barrel on the opposite end. Topsail grit his teeth. He hadn’t wanted to find out how viscous this stuff was—if he could just get a good grip on the handle and give it a solid pull, maybe that would be enough—

_back again?_

He jerked his head up, his eyes wide. That voice—he hadn’t _heard_ it, it had just appeared in his head, he _knew_ that voice--

Something moved within the pile, rolling forward from the depths. Perfectly spherical. Small enough to fit in Topsail’s hand. Dilated blue veins popping against the white sclera. Maroon iris. Rounded, horizontal pupil.

Topsail didn’t hear himself scream, didn’t know he’d scrambled away until he’d whacked the back of his head against the wall behind him. He held a hand over his mouth, willed himself to stop salivating and for his stomach to settle.

The eye was gone.

Blue pelted him from above. The globs of his own ink signature hit the sludge and exploded on impact, spraying him in the face. He flinched away, connecting with the wall again. Three’s footsteps pounded on the roof above him, he was running, though he’d ceased fire.

There was a noise like rattling metal on the opposite side of the alley. Charger fire broke the near-silence of the dome, ringing out far above the blood roaring in his ears. He forgot how to breathe until he saw the gun he’d borrowed, still on the ground, still half-swallowed by the goo. A narrow trail of blue ink materialized on the ground beside him. In the next instant, another formed on the wall, leading up to the roof. Something skimmed its surface, and barked in gurgling Octarian, **_“GO!”_**

He didn’t need to be told twice. He flew over the painted path, scaled the wall, and reformed upright atop the roof, rolling onto his side. The dome’s skylights swirled around him, as did the contents of his stomach inside him. He squeezed his eyes shut and listened to the splatter of ink against the asphalt below.

He was only allowed a few seconds of rest before the _thud_ of someone’s boots on the roof beside him made his eyes fly open. Commander loomed over him, her head backlit by the dome’s broken light, her face an eclipse. Her own personal goo pile still sat affixed on her shoulder. **“Get up.”**

It wasn’t easy to drag himself to his feet, not when he still wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t be sick if he opened his mouth, but he recognized that tone of voice and knew better than to disregard it. He’d barely found his balance before she thrust the charger into his arms, and he stumbled backward.

 **“What the hell was that?!”** Thankfully she’d slung her own charger across her back, because he had no doubt she’d jab him with it if it were in her hands. **“Not only did you just stand there and wait for that poison to eat you alive, you** ** _handed it your weapon?_ Are you insane or just stupid? Your incompetence insults every Octarian who came before you!”**

Three approached Topsail from behind, shouldering his way in between the two Octolings, one hand outstretched. “Stand down,” he snapped.

Commander knocked away his wrist and brushed past him like he wasn’t there—Topsail backed up a few more paces. **“Never in my life have I seen anything so pathetic, so shameful! Your ancestors are rolling in their graves! And you’d have joined them if I didn’t return when I did—you think he,”** she tossed her hand carelessly in the vague direction of Three, **“would have chosen your life over his safety on this rooftop? Idiot! What’s wrong with you?”**

“I said stand down!” Three threw himself in front of her again, gun in hand. He motioned with it for her to step aside. Instead she bared her teeth and reached for her own.

“Three, drop it.” The words came to Topsail’s lips without any thoughts to go with them. Three shot him a skeptical glance over his shoulder, but lowered his shooter and stepped away. Commander gave them both yet another glower before turning on her heel and firing off the roof. She leaped off the building and swam away, into the streets.

“We can’t lose her again,” Three growled, hurrying to the edge. He froze right before he made the jump as well, and turned around. “Sorry if I made things worse, I’m…not good at de-escalation. You’re good, right? She sounded pissed, but she didn’t…say anything?”

Again without his command, a wry smile made a fissure across Topsail’s face, bitterness he hadn’t experienced in years gushing from this broken dam. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”

He followed Three back through the empty city, his mind full to bursting with nothing of substance. This new route was bereft of the teal goo—it was almost like the stuff avoided the main streets—but what he had seen inside it haunted his mind’s eye no matter how he tried to tear his attention away. _It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be, he lost his eye when the doctors couldn’t save it, the goo didn’t **take** it from him… _

Hopefully the memories, as unpleasant as they were, would be the only thing to follow him back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone else came up with the "siphon" idea, i really wish i remembered their tumblr lmao. i hold it against no one for writing ink combat without taking into account the whole ink tank thing because frankly it's a big pain to remember and potentially interrupts the flow of the story. for a similar reason, do not ask me how the ink goes from the tank into the weapon. i do not know. it's a game about funy squids
> 
> sorry for being late again, my weekends always end up being busier than i anticipate. hopefully this chapter makes up for my lateness, i struggled writing this one for the Longest time but i'm happy it turned out the way it did, eventually.
> 
> comments/critique more than welcome!


	7. Chapter 7

Commander beat Topsail and Three back to the agents’ base in Octo Canyon, because of course she did, she was _insanely_ fast. But they were hot on her heels, bursting into the cabin as Eight rose from the table, staring at Commander with so many different emotions crossing their face that Topsail couldn’t name them all.

 **“Where’s the girl?”** Commander spoke with just the same steel as ever.

Eight opened and closed their mouth several times, the ends of their tentacles flexing. **“Agent Four,”** they said pointedly, **“is…not available. What do you want with—”**

Commander dropped three things from where they were slung on her back: her charger, the ink tank, and a slim black bag that Topsail would have almost been tempted to call a purse if its strap had been shorter, and if he could imagine the elite Octoling soldier carrying something like that at all. Did she have that on her this whole time? She tossed it at Eight, who caught it one-handed even though they had less than a second of warning. **“You’re welcome.”**

Eight shot her an exasperated glare as she picked up her gear and strode toward the back of the cabin. Three finally made his way through the doorway, toward Eight, his natural green ink washing out Topsail’s blue. Topsail pretended he didn’t feel crushing disappointment, instead watching Eight unzip the mysterious bag. Their eyes widened.

They withdrew a small plastic box, no longer or wider than the hand they held it in. They placed it on the table with an almost reverent care and popped it open, unfolding what looked like a thick sheet of translucent fabric. Their eyes traveled to Commander, somewhere on the other side of the cabin, disbelief making their mouth hang open an inch.

“The fuck is that.” Three echoed the thought Topsail didn’t want to put his voice to.

“It is a type of Octarian medtech.” Eight held the sheet in between their fingers as if it were a fine silk, or a thin pane of glass that might shatter beneath the gentlest touch. “This is designed for minor injuries—cuts and abrasions, or superficial burns, or, if you would imagine, a shot of enemy ink to the upper arm. It interacts with the body’s natural healing mechanisms to greatly speed up the process. It is, obviously, very precious.”

“Seriously?” Topsail couldn’t help but lean forward, the gears in his brain already turning. “How does that work on the molecular level?”

“I…have no idea.” Eight offered him an apologetic look, almost pouting. “I was a soldier, not a scientist…and that was the explanation we were given.”

“Okay, no, we are not just glossing over this.” Three shouldered his way back into the conversation, his brow furrowed. “You guys have just had this stuff lying around this whole time? And you didn’t share?”

Eight gave a blasé kind of shrug. “Necessity breeds invention. Perhaps if Inklings lost wars more often, you would feel the pressure to develop this kind of tech as well.”

Three shut his mouth.

“In time, perhaps it will become accessible to the general population. It was strictly for military use in the domes—few Octarian civilians would have ever seen it.” Eight eyed him again before standing up, carefully draping the medtech over their forearm. It darkened to match the color of their skin. “But at this moment, I will gladly share with Inklings.”

Topsail straightened up, scanning the room. Commander was leaning on the wall near the charger racks, her arms crossed and her face unreadable. There wasn’t much room for anyone to hide in this tiny cabin…his gaze came to rest on the bed on the opposite side. That side of the room was dark, but the bed’s shape looked too irregular for it to be empty. “Maya—is she okay?”

“She will be,” Eight replied, with enough conviction that Topsail almost believed them. “She, ah…overexerted herself when Commander fled. She needed rest…and for someone to keep an eye on her. But this will help.”

They now left the frontmost area of the cabin behind, knelt down by the bedside. This time, Three didn’t follow. Topsail also decided to keep his distance, seeing as how he’d have to brush past Commander to get there, and…his skin crawled just by imagining her eyes on him.

Three shook his head. “Four’s out,” he murmured, barely audibly, but Topsail didn’t take him for the type to talk to himself. “Once Eight patches her up, we should go. Won’t do any good hanging out around here…pissing her off.” He rolled one shoulder toward Commander. “Think Eight’s the only one she doesn’t fuckin’ hate.”

Topsail was not about to dispute that. Even so, just walking away from this whole situation put a weird taste in his mouth. “We’re not…leaving just like that, are we?”

Three shrugged, staring off in the distance. “I obviously can’t wash my hands of this whole thing. But Four’s all that’s keeping you here, and I’m not about to drag her back underground. When she’s ready, you and her should go home. Before anything worse happens.”

Topsail’s guts twisted on themselves. Well, after making a complete ass of himself seven different ways today…he wasn’t surprised Three was so eager to dismiss him. This factual reasoning did not make it any easier to bear the shame that swallowed him whole. He ground his teeth as he glanced away, out of one of the cabin’s windows. It was early afternoon now. The city square was sure to be even more populated than before, and the thought of wading through the crowd made him bristle. How he himself had managed to live here, not that long ago…

He froze. There was a teal glow in the reflection of the glass, just over his shoulder. The eye unfolded in his memory and stared him down. His mouth went dry.

“Actually, I…” He turned around to face Three, who at least now gave him the courtesy of eye contact, one eyebrow raised. “I have a…friend in the city. We’re clearly gonna have some downtime, so I think I might drop him a visit before I go.”

“Suit yourself.” Three shrugged again, and craned his neck to the other side of the cabin, where Maya and Eight were. “Honestly, given the state she’s in, I wouldn’t want you to drop her off at home alone. We’ll head back to my place, give her some more time to recover…for Eight’s medtech to work its alleged magic.” He sounded just a little skeptical, and Topsail couldn’t blame him—he’d never seen anything like it either. When he had been in the domes, no one he’d known had ever received an injury bad enough to necessitate the use of such advanced, and surely valuable, technology.

_Would sure have come in handy on the surface, though…_

Three straightened up and reached for his headset, disentangling it from the back of his head and dropping it onto the vacated table. His vest and jacket followed, and at this point Topsail averted his eyes—Three was still wearing a shirt underneath, but the last thing Topsail wanted to do was look like he was staring. Instead he watched the ground at his feet. It didn’t help him feel any less self-conscious.

He didn’t look up again until he heard Three shifting, and found him back in his normal outfit, his hero gear stuffed haphazardly into a nearby box and his shooter on another wall-mounted rack. Topsail admired his leather before more movement from the other side grabbed his attention. Maya was pale, but walking mostly on her own, though Eight shadowed her every move. She’d taken off the ratty hoodie she’d been wearing, an equally old-looking white t-shirt underneath. A patch of skin on her left arm almost shimmered in the light—the medtech. Where her wound was. Topsail couldn’t help but hope she’d let him investigate it later.

“I’m alright,” Maya was mumbling, though her pallor and her faint voice weren’t selling it very well. “I know I kinda freaked out on you earlier, but you don’t have to treat me like I’m made of glass.”

She blinked a few times before her eyes finally focused on Three and Topsail, and she gave a weak grin. “Glad you guys made it. You’re both fucking idiots.”

Three shrugged, in a way that suggested resignation rather than protest, and Topsail couldn’t find it in him to argue either.

“That is why they need you to keep an eye on them,” Eight said, and Maya snorted.

“Thanks for holding down the fort, Eight.” Three gave them a nod. “Good luck with…her. I’ll let you know what the plan is as it unfolds.”

“You mean we will have a plan for once? I feel spoiled.” Eight shot him a wry grin. “Four, make sure he gets some rest too. He is…what is the phrase? Looks like hell?”

“God, okay, _Mom.”_ Three made a big show of rolling his eyes and turning on his heel as Maya snickered beside him. Eight fluttered their fingers at his back, then met Topsail’s eyes and gave him a much less sarcastic wave. He returned it half-heartedly, more than ready to finally put the canyon behind him.

The travel back through Inkopolis was, thankfully, uneventful. The square was plenty populated with teenage Inklings, lining up outside that ever-popular food truck for post-match refreshments. No one paid the three any mind, not even when Maya would stumble over her own feet and Three would steady her by her uninjured arm. Seeing her so _out of it_ when Topsail could normally trust her to be the sharpest person in the room unnerved him in a visceral way. He didn’t want to start thinking of the Octarian medtech as a miracle cure, but…would it hurt to hope?

Yeah, probably.

Three’s apartment was dark and cool, a welcome reprieve from the heat of the sun, and the humidity of the Octarian domes. Three got Maya situated, leading her to his couch, before turning back to Topsail and giving him a shrug and a muttered, “Make yourself comfortable.” Then he disappeared into the back hallway amidst the shutting of a door.

Easier said than done. Topsail knew he was, technically, welcome, but nothing could stop the itchy feeling that he was out of place, certainly did not belong here, in a near-stranger’s apartment. But just standing there made him look as awkward as he felt, so he took one of the kitchen chairs and moved it as little as possible away from the table to leave himself enough room to sit in it. He retrieved his phone from his pocket, frowned down at it as he remembered what he’d said he’d do. Pulling up his contacts list was easy. Selecting the name was not. His thumb hovered over it long enough for him to lose his nerve.

 _Not now, not when she’s right there._ He closed out of the caller app and bit back a sigh. Maya stirred from her place on the couch, so he did his best to look busy, like he wasn’t chickening out of doing the only helpful thing he was capable of.

This couldn’t possibly be over soon enough.

-

Well, here she was. Maya was still a little floatier than she’d like, but with every step she took, she was pulled further and further back down to earth, back inside her own head.

The temptation to let herself melt into the couch cushions was unreal, but there were approximately a hundred thousand questions burrowing through her mind, and they would not let her rest. So she glared up at Three’s ceiling, her nose wrinkled, trying to get her thoughts in order. The enticement of answers was a siren song she could not resist even at her best. Her chance to ask was dwindling away with each second she let pass—Topsail would inevitably clam up the moment Three returned from the bathroom.

She sat up and the world only rolled around her for a moment. “Hey, T.”

He gave a mumbled affirmative from behind her, seated at Three’s kitchen table, on his phone, probably. Maya twisted herself around so her chin leaned on the back of the couch, and was quietly pleased to see her coworker in exactly the position she’d imagined him—slouched over, his legs crossed so his ankle sat on his opposite knee, scowling down at the phone in his hand.

“It might just be the blood loss talking, but I…wanna ask you some things. Some…kinda invasive things.”

Topsail’s head jerked upward like she’d shot at him. The look on his face was just a step under terrified.

“I mean—you don’t have to tell me anything,” she backpedaled, even if she knew she was throwing away her chance to learn more—and felt like screaming because of it. “Just, I guess, call it scientific curiosity. You know how it is.”

Maybe she was downplaying it a bit too much, as he didn’t relax at all, maybe even got tenser. His eyes narrowed, fixing her with much of the same suspicion he’d treated her with the first few days they’d started working together. “What do you want?” His words were sharp.

Yeah, she’d stepped in it. But the damage was already done, she might as well keep going, and hopefully get something useful out of it. Her tongue grazed the tips of her teeth as she put her words in place. “So…I know we’ve never really talked about this before…and I know it’s _super_ none of my business. But I just think…this kind of thing might be relevant? I couldn’t possibly tell you how, though.” That wasn’t entirely the truth, she had an idea, but if she turned out to be wrong…

“It _is_ none of your business.” Topsail glared at her before dropping his eyes to the ground. His hair-tentacles twitched and flexed around his face, making clear his agitation. “What gave it away?” he muttered.

“Gave what away?” Maya reflected his frown back at him. “Dude, I’ve known you’re an Octoling since day one. And you know that I knew. I didn’t think it was a secret between us.”

“Oh!” His demeanor didn’t _quite_ do a 180, but something similar, and he sat up straighter as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. “Oh, that’s what this is…uh, never mind what I just said.” Now he gave a bashful kind of shrug, no less awkward but at least less defensive. “But if you’re looking for insight into the Octarian lifestyle, I’m really not the best guy to ask.”

“Well, that’s not exactly what I’m after. I was more concerned with…you in particular. Your place in Octarian society.”

He shot her another sharp look, his brows furrowed. “I don’t have one.”

“Well, yeah, obviously not now, I wasn’t trying to imply…” She grimaced. But he did seem to catch on that her usual eloquence was eluding her and relaxed again, returning his eyes to his phone. “But, like, back when you were down there…”

“I was only a kid. And I don’t remember much at all.” He kept his eyes glued to the phone screen.

Maya knew a dismissal when she heard one, but her need for answers had far eclipsed her propriety. She worried the inside of her lip for a moment, knowing this was the point of no return, knowing she’d take the dive anyway. She never asked Topsail about anything she wouldn’t want to talk about herself, so her gentle prodding of him over the course of their friendship had steadfastly avoided the _f-word._ That would change today. She prayed he wouldn’t turn it on her. “Not even your family?”

He shook his head, almost nonchalantly. “Don’t have one. Never knew my parents. Either they never wanted me, or they’re dead. Probably both.”

“…Oh.” Okay, maybe she wouldn’t be able to smooth this over with the ease she’d imagined.

He swept on. “All I know is what the military told us. Me and five other gir—kids, all orphaned young, all living on the streets. They took us in, because they sensed something _special_ in us.” The bitterness with which he snarled that word made Maya’s gut clench. “They gave us food and a roof over our heads, and told us they’d help us reach our full potential as the greatest soldiers the military would ever see. Look how that turned out. The only reason I didn’t flunk out was ‘cause I—I ran away before I did. Before they could show me the consequences of that failure."

Silence settled like a suffocating blanket over them both. Maya tried not to wince at the thumping of her hearts, which exacerbated the panging in her arm. It wasn’t often she was rendered speechless, and she tried to push her way through it. “I…I’m sorry, Topsail. I didn’t think…”

“Didn’t think an Octoling would have a tragic backstory?” He raised his eyebrows, and she couldn’t help but take relief in the sarcastic kind of levity—he couldn’t be too mad at her if he had the words to waste on being facetious.

“I mean, I didn’t assume you had a _happy_ upbringing, I just…wasn’t expecting the detail. But I’m done prying, I promise.” She held her hands up, palms facing him.

“Did you get what you needed?” He regarded her with some scrutiny again, and the tip of one of his tentacles twitched.

 _No, but yes._ “Yeah, I was just…curious, is all. Being in the domes so often just made me think, you know?”

“About my family, or lack thereof?”

This hypothesis of hers was burning a hole right through her tongue, but she knew this was not the time. “Not so much that specifically,” that was a lie, “just, like, what ties you might still have to the underground. I’d ask the same of Eight if I didn’t already know their memory loss kind of…ate everything useful.”

She couldn’t tell if her rampant bullshitting actually worked or if he just chose not to further pursue it, again glancing down at his phone. “Everything I care about even a little bit is on the surface. The underground holds nothing of value to me. End of.”

“Got it.” Oh, this was going to suck so much.

The sound of running water and a door being opened preceded Three re-entering the living room, his eyes roaming from Maya to Topsail. Was he picking up on the tension? Worse, had he overheard? Neither of them had been speaking loudly, but this was a tiny apartment with thin walls…

He glanced back at her. “You look tired.”

“Do I?” She could, and would, fake it all she liked, but she knew she wasn’t even close to a hundred percent. And Three’s experienced eye would not be fooled by her posturing. He knew exactly what it was like, and wouldn’t let her go.

Three motioned into the back hallway again. “You need rest. ‘Cause we need you to be up and running ASAP.”

Maya allowed herself a breezy huff of laughter. “You sound literally exactly like Mar—Two.”

He took a staggering step backward, clapping a hand to his chest in faux distress. “Ouch! Uncalled for.”

She shot him a weary grin. “Truth hurts.”

Fighting the couch’s gravity was the hardest thing she’d done all day, but she prevailed, only wobbling on her feet a little as she stood. “But since I’m being nagged at, I’ll acquiesce. Though you should follow my lead, Three. Eight was right about you looking like hell.”

“Thanks.” Three shot her a toothless glare. “I planned on it, just figured I should probably scrape up some food first.”

“Sounds good.” She caught Topsail’s eye and offered him a bright, only slightly forced grin. He responded with a blank, nudibranch-in-headlights stare. Then she brushed behind Three to take his place in the back hallway. In truth, the last thing she wanted to do was waste precious time being unconscious, but Three did have a point—how much use was she when her wound kept acting up, distracting her, making her slow? The whole medtech thing sounded too good to be true, but it was too early to tell if it was working yet. The passage of time was the only player here, and she hated it, but what could she do?

Whatever words Three and Topsail may have been exchanging were indiscernible as she closed Three’s bedroom door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> now that the Big Plot Setup is over, most of these following chapters will contain a pov switch toward the end like this one. often they'll be flashbacks, but not always. i just feel like the story benefits from not being in just one character's head the entire time.
> 
> these next few updates will admittedly be a break from the action but they're fun i promise


	8. Chapter 8

Topsail paced on Three’s balcony, his phone squished against his cheek. The evening breeze ghosted across his face, but it did nothing to soothe the anxious coiling of his gut. He tapped his fingers on the railing, looking out over the city skyline, backlit by the oranges and purples of the sunset. The line rang, and rang, and rang.

A femtosecond before it went to voicemail, she picked up, and Topsail could have fallen to his knees at the sound of her voice. “Topsail?” she said. “Is everything alright?”

“Hey, Lanna.” He closed his eyes, let the calm her voice brought him wash over him like the tide. Hearing his chosen name through a heavy Octarian accent was something he’d always found weirdly comforting. Atlanta Cirromagna just radiated peace, really, at least to him. The people who went up against her and her world-famous league team probably didn’t share this sentiment. But he didn’t care. Ten years ago, she’d saved his life a thousand times over, and he owed her everything.

“That’s not an answer to my question.” Atlanta had switched to Octarian, she and the others always preferred to speak their native tongue when they could. Topsail had picked up Inkling with more ease than they had, being younger and, at the time, more neuroplastic. “And nine times of ten, when you call me, it means something’s gone wrong.”

“I, uh…” Well, she got him there. He tried not to cringe and made a mental note to send her something nice for her birthday. “I…I’m fine. But I’m kind of…caught up in some stuff…”

Atlanta sighed, making the line crackle. Topsail could practically picture her face, her brilliant purple eyes closed in exasperation, the freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, her indigo tentacles hanging loosely at her jaw level. “I will tell you what I told the others: I’m only bailing you out of jail _once.”_

Topsail almost choked. “It’s not like that! I’m not in legal trouble—you really think that’s something I’d do?” Actually, now that he thought about it, the New Squidbeak Splatoon might be of questionable legality, being an underground organization whose members carried legitimate, military-grade weapons…

“Just making sure. You’re full of surprises.” She said it with a smile, he could tell even without seeing her face. “Really, though, what’s going on?”

This was the part he wasn’t looking forward to. “I’m not sure I can tell you. The more people who know about it, the more we risk word getting out, and…this has to be kept confidential. Fix it before anyone notices it’s happening. But I swear I’m not in any immediate danger, please don’t worry about me.”

She went silent, for long enough that Topsail wondered if he’d accidentally hung up on her. “Does this have to do with the underground?”

Were it anyone else asking, he might have tried to lie. Not with her, never with her. She’d see right through it anyway. He mumbled a sheepish affirmative.

Atlanta sighed again. “Oh, Topsail, little brother, how do you always end up in these situations?”

The affectionate nickname was an Octarian phrase, and untranslatable. Exclusive to describing tight bonds between Octarian soldiers, it was an explicit statement of unconditional trust and familial closeness. She’d been calling him that for years now, but it still always made him smile and blink away tears at the same time. “Wish I knew. Anyway, I didn’t call because I wanted to get you involved in this mess, because I don’t. I was going to ask if you could…let Red know I’m coming to see him.”

Another drawn-out, agonizing silence. Topsail winced to himself, his eyes on instinct dropping to the cement balcony beneath his feet.

“You…want to speak to him. By yourself.”

“He has information I need that no one else has, not even you. I happen to be in town, right now. And unless you are too, I can’t wait around for someone else to referee.”

Atlanta made a frustrated groaning noise, confirming what he already knew—she was only regularly in Inkopolis during off-season. “There are ways around him—”

“Not this time. I need to hear it straight from him, as much as he’s willing to give me.”

“He won’t be willing at all, Topsail, you know—”

“It’s not for my sake, it’s for Inkopolis. If I can just convince him of that, then…”

Atlanta didn’t speak. Topsail imagined her rubbing her temples. “I don’t know if your optimism is inspiring or stupid.”

“I’d be quicker to describe it as ‘rare.’”

That almost got a laugh out of her, a quick huff through her nose. “I suppose you’ve already made up your mind, then. Even if I tell you I think it’s a bad idea.”

“Oh, I know it’s a bad idea. But…it’s all I’ve got. I have to do _something.”_

“Yes, I understand.” She paused, as if taking a moment to accept she was actually going to do this thing she knew she shouldn’t enable. Topsail knew the feeling well. “I’ll warn him of your intentions.”

The bittersweet that flooded Topsail made him want to reach inside his chest cavity and rip his hearts out. “Thanks, Lanna. This is…so important for me to do. I was thinking…probably no sooner than noon tomorrow. It would be nice if I could just communicate with him directly…”

“It would,” Atlanta agreed with an exasperated kind of half-sigh, “but that’s not a fight I think is worth picking. Not yet, anyway. Would you believe we think he’s getting better?”

“No,” Topsail scoffed without thinking. Fortunately, Atlanta gave another breathy chuckle.

“Well, you probably won’t be able to tell, but he is making progress. I have hope for him.”

“You have hope for everyone.” That was only the entire reason Topsail was alive right now.

Atlanta made a contemplative humming noise in her throat. “Guilty. You don’t have to say it like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s not, Lanna, it’s really not.” Topsail smiled as his hearts ached. A shadow crossed on the balcony, thrown by the inside light behind him. “I should go—thank you. For—for everything. I won’t keep you any longer.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I always have time for you, just as I have time for Red or Coral or Adrian.”

Topsail’s dam nearly broke at that. It took all his strength to keep his instinctual thoughts behind his tongue: _I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve any of the kindness you’ve ever shown me._

“And, Topsail…please don’t take to heart anything he says about you. I know he can be…” She trailed off, thinking, choosing her words with great care. “Antagonistic. Just know that…the rest of us don’t blame you. We did what we could, and what happened…happened. It’s no one’s problem but his that he cannot let go.”

“Y-yeah, I know.” His voice cracked and he cringed.

“I’ll be rooting for you, little brother. Please be safe. I hope the next time you call me, it’s with good news.”

“So do I. Bye, Lanna. Good luck with the tournament next month.”

He could hear her grin over the receiver. “Appreciated, but you know I don’t need luck.”

She hung up. He took a minute to compose himself, leaned on the wall and pushed his glasses up to wipe at his eyes. Fuck Red, fuck the military, fuck the goo and fuck everything and everyone that had ever made Topsail’s life hell—and he’d do it all again in a heartbeat if it meant someone as selfless and compassionate as Atlanta would consider him a brother.

He leaned on the banister, letting the cool air wash over him as he stared out at the sun dipping below the Inkopolis skyline. Atlanta was right to be skeptical; the idea of Topsail getting any worthwhile information out of Red, the only person on the planet to hate him more than he hated himself, was laughable. But worst-case scenario, he returned empty-handed and with a bruised ego. Best-case…this knowledge could save them all.

The creak of the door as he came back inside made Three’s head snap up from where he sat at his kitchen table, phone in hand. The look the agent gave him wasn’t…warm, nor was it suspicious or annoyed. “Got things with your friend all sorted?” he asked, his voice flat.

“Yeah.” Topsail tried not to think about the encounter that awaited him tomorrow. Calling Red a “friend” was a pretty gratuitous stretch of the truth—generally they weren’t even on speaking terms unless Atlanta or someone else were there to mediate—but Three didn’t need to know that. “I’ll drop in on him tomorrow.”

In the meantime, though…he tried not to appear as awkward as he felt, mere feet away from Three and completely unsure of what to do with himself. And then there was the gnawing chasm in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything since that morning and he was borderline hypoglycemic, but asking Three for food just put…a bad taste in his mouth. He’d almost prefer passing out from hunger. Almost.

“Hey, so…” _God_ he was bad at sounding casual. But Three glanced up from his phone again. “Do we have any plans for dinner? Maya’s gonna be starving when she gets up, and…trust me, she gets hangry.” He’d probably feel worse about throwing her under the bus if what he said wasn’t true.

Three grimaced and averted his eyes. “Uh…yeah. About that. There’s not a lot here…’m not home much.”

Fair enough, Topsail supposed. He felt around for his own phone in his pocket. “After today? I don’t want to expend any more energy than I must. We should just get something delivered.”

Three did not ease up. He reached for one of the lapels on his jacket and rubbed his thumb over the studs, patterned in a diamond shape.

Topsail clued in. “On me. Don’t worry about it.”

Three’s fingers released his lapel. “But—”

“Seriously, it’s fine. I’m not hurting. And Maya gets me something from Seastarbucks practically every time she stops there before work. I must owe her a hundred shells in lattes alone. This is for her. You’re just…collateral damage.” Okay maybe that was not the most thoughtful way of putting it.

But if Three took offense, he didn’t show it, instead closing his mouth and glancing at the table with an alien meekness. He swallowed. “Thanks.”

Some phantom possessed Topsail in that moment, some ghost of boldness past, that made him shoot the agent a grin brimming with self-confidence he had never known. “What are friends for?” He slid his phone across the kitchen table like a hockey puck, and it skidded to a halt squarely in front of Three. “You pick. I’m not very familiar with this side of town, I have no idea what’s good.”

He almost thought Three’s eyes lingered on him for a moment too long, but told himself fiercely that he imagined it, because if not he’d flush and _fucking ruin_ this nice charade of bravery.

Three plucked at his phone, and Topsail thought he might be using a little more care than normal. “Oh, there’s this southeastern-style place a few blocks from here that my friend swears by. ‘S pretty fair priced for how heavy the stuff they serve is. Haven’t been there in a while, but…oh, cool, they do deliver.”

“I trust your judgement.” That _was_ kind of Topsail’s only option, but he felt cool saying it. He slid into a chair diagonally opposite Three’s and absently ran his claws over the table’s grain. It was weird having downtime after the whirlwind that was today…had he really woken up in his own bed this morning, convinced it would be an unremarkable day like any other? Thinking about it made him realize how dead tired he was, weariness spearing his muscles and slowing his brain.

“What are we doing regarding sleeping arrangements?” Somehow he doubted there was a second bedroom hidden in that back hallway.

“Four’s got dibs on my room, even if she argues.” Three’s eyes flicked up. “You get the couch, which is not the most uncomfortable place I’ve ever slept. And I guess I’ll just gather up a bunch of blankets and shit and make a nest on the floor somewhere. Also not the least comfortable thing I’ve done.”

Topsail shook his head. “You take the couch. I have issues sleeping under the best circumstances, and this…is not.”

“Dude, come on, I’m not making you sleep on my floor.”

“I’ll barely sleep at all no matter what. We need you most functional, so you should take the better option. You’re _the_ Agent Three.”

Three forced some air through his nose and passed Topsail’s phone back to him, the order form filled out except for the payment portion. “Caspian.”

“What?”

“My real name’s Caspian. Friends call me Cas.” He raised a hand to the back of his head, and the other found his lapel again. There was an odd look on his face, a bashful kind of almost-smile that made Topsail’s blood run white-hot. “You’ve known me for less than a day and you’re buying me dinner, man. I’m done hiding behind a stupid codename. Just, uh, when we’re out on agent business, do me a favor and stick with ‘Three.’ I’ll admit I’m a little paranoid.”

Now it was Topsail’s turn to linger for just too long. He tore himself away to busy himself with his phone. “Oh, uh, yeah. Sure.” He scrolled past the address part of the order form: deliver to Caspian Verani.

_Even his name’s attractive. This is just not fair._

The awkward silence settled around them both, so much worse than even the most stifling summer heat. Topsail scrolled aimlessly through his social media, barely reading any of the words that passed him by. Eventually, though, Three—Caspian—broke the silence. “So I’ve never really asked Four about what her day job is. I know she’s a scientist and all of that, but the details went over my head. What do you and her do?”

Topsail could recite this kind of elevator speech in his sleep. “Oh, we study the mechanisms behind the microbe-mediated degradation of ink. Maya’s more focused on the microbiology aspect, while I’m into the biochemistry. We’re working on a manuscript about our findings, it’s a huge pain in the ass, but I think it’ll be worth it.”

Normally even that much information scared off anyone not already attuned to the science of it, but Caspian was either genuinely interested or very good at faking it, and Topsail decided he didn’t care if there was a difference. “How’s that work? Keep in mind, last time I thought about science was when I was in high school. I don’t remember a damn thing about biology class except some contextless bullshit about the mitochondria.”

Topsail smiled, couldn’t help himself. “If you remember what a protein is, you’re in better shape than some of my academic peers.”

They talked for long enough that Topsail lost track of time, only realized it had been close to forty-five minutes when their food knocked on the door. And still the conversation continued over dinner, jumping from topic to topic. Topsail learned more about Caspian than he thought he’d ever know—he was the second of four siblings, and his older sister was about to graduate med school. He’d lived in Inkopolis his whole life, and went through the standard teenage period of hating it and everyone in it until falling into the “agent” gig. He’d painted the logo on the back of his jacket himself. It was that of his favorite band, Mortichnia, and his best friend since middle school had introduced them to him when they were kids. He smiled whenever he talked about his family and friends, and every time it made Topsail’s hearts do backflips.

He didn’t want to talk about himself all that much, but Caspian pressed him, so he gave up what he could. He reluctantly alluded to the foster home in Inkopolis in which he lived from age twelve to eighteen, and regretted it when Caspian’s gaze turned somber. He didn’t want his pity. He wanted…the exact opposite. It was much easier to talk about his college days, when he wasn’t living under the shadow of someone he’d never be. It was the first time in his life he’d felt independent, free, _himself._ He thought his stories got much more interesting, then.

“So I’m doing my best to saw around this turtle’s ribcage to get to the heart, but all the membranes and stuff are getting in the way—in vertebrates, _everything_ is solid, and hard to break. And then my lab partner goes, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ He reaches straight into its chest cavity with his bare hands and—” he mimed the motion, lifting his hand in the air, straining against an invisible force. “— _Rips_ the heart out with his fingers, Temple of Doom style. It was efficient, I guess, but I was a little scared of him for the rest of the semester.”

Caspian laughed, and Topsail did his best to burn that sound into his memory. “I won’t pretend I didn’t think about doing that when we dissected frogs in high school, but at least I had the self-control to not follow through.” He paused, his brows coming together. “Where did you go to high school, anyway? You said you were on the surface for it…”

“Inkopolis High.” Had he really neglected to mention that? “They did want to send me to a private school, but my…program wasn’t exactly rolling in money. It worked out, I guess. I got my diploma, and a better feel for the standard Inkling adolescence than I would have otherwise.”

Caspian’s frown deepened. “When’d you graduate?”

When Topsail told him, he leaned back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was a year behind you, dude. We missed each other, completely, by that much. Wild.”

Topsail had never been so grateful that this was the case. He offered Caspian a smile he hoped was less awkward, less nervous, than he felt. “Even if we hadn’t, I don’t think you would have recognized me now. I’m, uh…nowhere near the same person I was when I was a teenager. And glad for it.”

Caspian gave another quiet hum of laughter. “On my worst days, I think, ‘thank god I’m not fifteen anymore.’ My little sister’s around that age now—recently uprighted. Sometimes I feel like I should pass off all my hero gear to her, she needs it more than I do.”

“Including the gun?”

“Especially the gun. High school boys are shitheads. Plus, taking a shot of high-power ink to the face whenever you do dumb shit really builds character. I would know.”

Movement from the back hallway made Topsail turn. Maya stifled a yawn with her hand, and mumbled around it, “You guys get takeout?”

“Have at it.” Caspian indicated an empty chair beside Topsail and she threw herself in it, grabbing whatever was closest. “What’ve you been up to?” she asked with her mouth full.

“Just shooting the shit.” Caspian shrugged. “Current events. How we got here. Stuff we’ve done.”

“Oh, story time?” Her eyes glimmered. “Did T tell you the one about the turtle dissection? It’s his favorite.”

Was he really that predictable? “Maya,” he whined, like it was her fault.

“He did, in fact, spin me the tale of the ritualistic sacrifice.” Caspian leaned back in his chair, stretching his arms above his head. His shirt slipped up above his waist, and Topsail allowed himself half a second to look at the sliver of exposed skin before averting his eyes and sinking his teeth into the inside of his cheek. This was risky business with Maya right there—if she caught on, his life was over. _Worth it,_ whispered some deeply-buried part of his brain that he was not proud of and wished would crawl back into the hole it came from.

Caspian now stood, gathering the disposable wrappings and containers off the table. “Not to completely bail on you both, but…I’m half dead. I’m gonna shower and knock out. Gotta be prepared for the fresh hell that awaits us tomorrow.”

“Love the optimism. Godspeed, Agent Three.” Maya held two fingers to her temple in a mock salute and he rolled his eyes as he disappeared into the back hallway.

Maya next turned to Topsail, looked him up and down. “You got that look on your face like you’re sick of being around people. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute, I promise.”

“…I have a face that says I’m sick of being around people?”

“Yeah, dude, it’s your default expression.” Maya snickered, and then immediately sobered, the mischief evaporating from her face in an instant. “Hey, apropos of nothing…thanks. For coming all the way out here, on a moment’s notice, on my behalf, at the behest of a stranger. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

He cracked a smile, couldn’t help himself. “Been asking myself that since I was born.” The facetiousness was easy; the knowledge that this was not the furthest he’d go for her, however, was not. She was the only Inkling who had ever made an effort to reach out to him, the only one since he’d reached the surface who seemed to _want_ to be his friend, cared whether or not he was around…and for that, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for her. Even imagining expressing this sentiment to her made his throat tighten around the words.

“I really do appreciate it, T. And I’m sorry I got you dragged into this cluster. I owe you one. Or…probably closer to a thousand, given how today’s gone.”

“Don’t worry about it.” His response was automatic.

“Too late! I’m not letting you go before I’ve paid you back…somehow, some way.” She shrugged as she got up, bringing a fist to her mouth to hide her yawn. “You’ve really done it now, you’re never gonna be able to get rid of me.” The grin she gave him was softer than normal, maybe it was just the exhaustion in her eyes. “Sleep well, T.”

He tried and failed not to smile as she followed the other agent into the back hall, leaving him alone in the kitchen. Maya could make friends with anyone she chose to, he was sure, and yet, she chose him…and didn’t even seem to regret it. This warm feeling unfolding inside his chest was unfamiliar, but one he could get used to.

He passed the time on his phone—a terrible habit of his, staring at a screen right before trying to sleep, no wonder it was such a struggle most nights—and didn’t look up until he heard movement. Caspian had amassed an enormous pile of miscellaneous blankets and pillows and dumped them all unceremoniously in the farthest corner of the living room, away from the balcony and the couch. Topsail was surprised to see him wearing a color other than black—plain gray sweatpants and a loose, off-white t-shirt that had seen better days. _And he’s **still** handsome. _He rolled his eyes at himself.

Caspian’s eye jumped to him as he stood up. “Here it is,” he muttered, almost sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Look, I really don’t mind taking the floor—”

Topsail shook his head. “I’ll be fine. It’s better this way.”

“If you’re sure.” Caspian didn’t seem convinced, but also clearly lacked the energy to argue, as he flopped on the couch like his legs gave out from under him. “Bathroom’s down the hall, on the left. Sorry if I snore.”

Topsail did not know how to respond to that, so he fled the scene, cursing his awkwardness with every step.

He wasn’t gone for much longer than five minutes—he, of course, hadn’t anticipated that he wouldn’t come home tonight when he’d left for work this morning, and felt gross without brushing his teeth—but that had been more than enough time for Caspian to pass out cold, one arm slung over his eyes and the other dangling off the edge of the couch. His mouth hung open, and he was, indeed, snoring, though not loudly enough that Topsail found it obtrusive.

 _Or anything other than cute,_ whispered that little demon that had taken up residence in his head. He stomped it into microscopic pieces.

Rather than be _fucking creepy_ and watch Caspian sleep, Topsail flicked off the light and fought his way through the dark to the impressive pile of linens. He wasn’t going to freeze tonight, that was for sure. Caspian’s uninterrupted snoring suggested he remained dead to the world, so Topsail undressed. His shirt had to go, it was the only thing he had and he needed to extend its lifespan for as long as possible, and he wasn’t some kind of freak who could sleep in jeans. He padded the floor with a few of the blankets and covered himself with the rest. Reluctantly, he took off his glasses, and had no other choice but to hope that no one would accidentally crush them as he put them beside him on the floor.

The city lights filtered in through the balcony door, and the muffled rumbling of distant cars layered beneath Caspian’s snores was just inconsistent enough to be bothersome. He lay there, too awake to even close his eyes despite his exhaustion, his imagination and his poor uncorrected vision creating dancing shadows on the walls and ceiling. He chased the same few thoughts around and around in his head. He’d had better nights. He’d also had much worse.

Without even realizing it, hours or months or decades later, he dropped off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and, finally, we learn more about "agent three" (though if you've been following my other social media you already know quite well who he is lmao). things will only get gayer from here
> 
> topsail's turtle story is based on true events. and yeah i guess the indiana jones series survived the apocalypse and/or was remade for squids to enjoy (it's hard to make effective references to fictional media within fictional media that your nonfictional readers will still understand. i call it the troll will smith problem)


	9. Chapter 9

Maya eyed the pile of blankets and pillows stuffed in the corner of the living room. She didn’t want to be the one to do this, but…better her than Caspian. She caught a glimpse of a blue tentacle sticking out from the chaos and knelt beside it, following it down to the head it was attached to, and then a bare shoulder. She reached out and gave it a light nudge. “Rise and shine, T, we have _a day_ ahead of us.”

The tentacle she was eyeing curled in on itself. She pushed harder. “Hey. C’mon, don’t ignore me. T-rex. Topsail. Don’t make me break out your favorite nickname.”

She couldn’t tell which way he was oriented, but the blankets shifted like he was rolling away from her. _You asked for it._ “Topsy.”

“Thin ice, Scolopes,” the pile growled.

“Good morning, merry sunshine!” She sat back on her heels as he extricated himself from the blanket nest, digging his fists into his eyes amidst a groan. He looked weird without his glasses…and his shirt, she realized belatedly, her eyes traveling over a discolored swatch of skin on his shoulder. It was a splattermark, one with fingers that reached down his upper arm, and around his shoulder blade, and…that was the reason for the weird flecks on his neck and jaw, she realized. She’d noticed them before but knew it wasn’t her business. She dropped her gaze from him to look for his glasses on the floor, picking them up gingerly by the frames and handing them over.

“Three’s getting dressed,” she informed him as his eyes focused on her. “I thought we’d go back to the canyon, but then he said something about you wanting to see a friend?”

He froze, his hand still raised from pushing his glasses onto his face. He dropped it into his lap, lifelessly. “Yeah. Right. What time is it?”

“Quarter to eleven. We all slept in a little, but…after yesterday, I think we deserve it.” She got back on her feet, to give him some space as he shoved away some of the blankets covering him. She had zero interest in seeing him in his evident state of undress, so she gave him his privacy, wandering into the kitchen as she listened to the rustling of his clothes. “There’s not much here in the way of breakfast. Bet we could find a café or something near the square, though.”

“It’s fine. I’m not hungry.” He looked like he meant it, a borderline nauseated look on his face as he pulled the shirt he’d been wearing yesterday over his head. It knocked his glasses askew, and he set them aright with a frown.

“You don’t look very excited for someone who’s visiting an alleged friend.” She felt bad for poking him about this, but her curiosity demanded to be sated—truthfully, until now she didn’t think he’d _had_ any friends, besides her.

He winced, which did not ease her guilt. “It’s…complicated.”

That particular word made her hackles rise. “Dude, if this is a ‘getting back together with your ex’ thing, I’m gonna have to put my foot down.”

“Oh _god_ no!” That at least snapped him out of looking tortured, the expression on his face nothing short of utter revulsion. That was…almost an improvement, Maya decided. “It’s _really_ not like that. We’ve just had…a turbulent friendship, I guess. He’s hard to get along with. But I want to make the effort.”

Maya shook her head, mostly to clear her mind as more guilt bubbled up inside her. She needed to learn when to just leave things alone—some friend she was, to drag this out of him when he’d been awake for all of three minutes. “More power to you, but…know when you’re wasting your time.”

He opened his mouth, closed it wordlessly, and dropped his eyes to the floor. “Yeah,” he mumbled after a while. “Right now, I think it’s still worth it.”

He sure didn’t look happy saying it, but Maya firmly told herself to butt out. Either way, Caspian re-entered the main living area from the back hallway, ensuring they couldn’t further discuss it. He’d lost the leather jacket, but was otherwise still dressed in his usual solid black from head to toe, another scratchy white logo of some other band Maya had never heard of adorning his shirt.

Topsail quickly excused himself from the room, squeezing past Caspian to vanish into the hallway, toward the bathroom. Caspian gave Maya a glance when he was out of earshot. “Is he…okay? Looks exhausted.”

“Probably didn’t sleep too well,” Maya remarked, giving as much of a flippant shrug as she could manage. She did believe her own words, but she was also pretty sure she hadn’t just imagined the faint blue tinge in Topsail’s face as he fled. The implications made her want to light up like the city square on Splatfest night, but she’d keep her cool as long as she was under Caspian’s eye.

Caspian made a noise in his throat that to anyone else would have sounded like just a grunt, but Maya understood it as a sympathetic kind of murmur. “Told him he should’ve just taken the damn couch.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten through to him. Octolings. Stubborn.”

“Okay, Four, no need to bring his species into it.”

“I can say that ‘cause one, it’s true, and two, he’s my friend and I love him.”

“Don’t think that’s how those privileges work.”

“Hey, at least it’s mutual. Once, when we first started working together, he told me I was ‘very observant for an Inkling,’ and I was flattered!”

“It does take more than a backhanded compliment to piss you off.” Caspian would have smiled if he didn’t instead break into a yawn. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes. “This shit’s tough. On everyone. Sooner it’s over with, the better.”

She couldn’t argue with that, not over the dull aches of pain that regularly rode through her bad arm. Unconsciously, she covered it with her other hand, applying gentle pressure. The texture of the Octarian medtech was almost clammy against her fingertips. “Yeah…but you never know what good might come out of the worst situations.”

“Since when were you an optimist?”

“I call it like I see it. I’ll let you know when we’re allowed to lose all hope.” She locked eyes with him and grinned. “Chin up, Agent Three. Better times are coming—and that’s a threat.”

-

Caspian stormed down the sidewalk with only half the intensity of the tempest rolling in his head. School sucked, as usual. Dad had yelled at him over “making all that noise” under his roof, as usual. So he left. He would have gone to his best friend’s place, like he normally did whenever he needed to get away, but Hudson had an IEP meeting or something today, of course he did. So Caspian was going to find himself some nice, secluded place to practice, to clear his head.

Not that he had any hope of finding such a haven in fucking Inkopolis, but at least this way he was out of the house. He shouldered his guitar case and felt some grim pride in watching an adult Inkling, dressed in a suit and tie, cross the street rather than pass him on the sidewalk.

His blind tantrum had led him to wander into Inkopolis Plaza. He rolled his eyes at himself. There was no chance of finding any privacy here, not with people streaming in and out of the nearby stores and Inkopolis Tower. Everywhere in this damn city was too populated. He tried not to grimace as he realized he might have to return home, tail between legs, and give up on practicing for today.

But as he turned, his ears twitched at a familiar voice. His stomach twisted. That trio of Inklings who were leaving the tower, shoulders swinging, laughing it up—he knew them, and wished he didn’t. They’d picked a fight with him and Hudson just last month, were brave enough to share some choice words from what they thought was the relative safety of the other side of the parking lot. Caspian burned at the mere memory of their jeering, but even then, with the sting fresh in his gut, he hadn’t wanted to get involved. Hudson, bless his hearts, had other plans.

They won. Barely. Caspian remembered all too well the black eye he’d sported for a week. Hudson had told him to wear it like a badge of honor, but it got him too many stares from the other kids, too much contemptuous head-shaking from teachers who didn’t know a damn thing about him. It was not an experience he was looking to repeat, but if those assholes caught him here…three against one, and he was also burdened by his bass. His pride and joy, his most prized possession, he’d hoarded Squidmas and birthday money and mowed every lawn in the city to earn it. He’d sooner die than let it become collateral damage.

He ducked into the nearest alleyway, into the shadows and out of sight. Adrenaline already pumped through his veins, making his hands tremble. He made sure he was alone in the alley before he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. No, this wasn’t the _bravest_ thing he’d ever done, but he did tend to value survival over honor.

Another noise that made his ears flick. Was he alone here after all? He peered further down, away from the plaza, into the depths. Empty, still, except for a grated manhole cover. He approached it, expecting to hear the rushing of water from below, but instead what he got was the clang of metal against metal—and a voice? Too distant to tell any words, and it quieted before he could convince himself he hadn’t imagined it.

He wasn’t the impulsive type, but he _was_ a teenage boy, and his common sense could only function so much of the time. Before he knew it he’d turned squid and dropped through the grate. He twisted in midair, feeling himself picking up speed, falling ever faster—falling up?

The grate spat him out, and he seemed to hover in the air for a moment before he changed back to upright form and landed back on the grate with a nice, solid _clunk._ He took in his new surroundings: giant rock structures in the near distance, waterfalls cascading down their surfaces, some of them kind of resembling tentacles if he squinted. But closer than that were manmade steel platforms, their generators creating a whirring white noise, at direct odds to the nature that contained it. Clumps of especially resilient grass sprouted out of the rocky ground he stepped on. And directly in front of him was a shack—a little run down, old wooden beams with some sheets of metal reinforcement. But it also looked like it was bursting with wires and plugs and all sorts of recent technology. It looked…lived in. That made Caspian more uneasy than he wanted to admit.

Still, the siren song of this isolated little place was too much for him to resist. Whatever weird freak lived here, they sure weren’t around now. He wandered away from the shack, following what looked like a little road, lined by crumbling cement walls. He settled himself beneath a tree that almost looked as if it were growing straight out of the asphalt, and listened to the wind breathing through its leaves. What were the chances that anyone besides him knew about this place? The secrecy only added to the serenity he found here. He thumbed the latches on his guitar case, but decided against it for now, instead reaching for the outside pocket. He pulled out a beaten-up spiral notebook and a pencil covered in bite marks, and stuck the eraser end into the corner of his mouth as he flipped to a new page. He could wring something out of his brain here, he felt it coming, flowing through his mind just as surely as the ink that coursed through his body.

“What are you doing here?”

He nearly jumped out of his own ink at the voice. He leapt to his feet, dropping the notebook and pencil, his hearts pounding. Approaching him in a hurried shamble was an elderly Inkling, walking with a bamboo cane. Gaunt, wrinkled, and wearing…not enough clothes, the old man stopped a few feet from Caspian and brandished his cane, pointing at his chest. Beneath the unkempt white beard, Caspian saw a number of military badges pinned to the patchy “cape” he wore in lieu of a shirt. Great, he’d pissed off a homeless veteran. That wasn’t very punk.

His adrenaline made his mouth move faster than his brain, though. “Back off, grandpa,” he snorted. “I was just leaving. Don’t bother chasing me away from this dump of yours, you’ll just dry out trying.”

The old man’s popped, bloodshot eyes fixed him without blinking once. The end of the cane slowly lowered back to the ground. He spoke again. “That’s it. You’re the one!”

Caspian glanced up from where he’d stooped to pick up his notebook. “Pardon?”

The old guy struck the ground with his cane, cackling. “And I’d been out there in the plaza, looking for the right one—to think he’d just fall into my lap!” He again pointed the cane at Caspian, who stiffened—were canes supposed to be hollow, like staring into the barrel of a gun? “You got an adventurous spirit to find my little stakeout here. You got an attitude, so you’re not just gonna roll over in the face of hardship. And…” He peered around Caspian to his guitar case. “You’re a musician, too? You’re perfect! How good are you at fightin’, kid?”

Caspian reflected the old man’s blank stare back at him, before finally muttering, “I…may have been in one or two.”

“You any good with a Splattershot?”

All the times Caspian had been turf-warring had been at Hudson’s behest, and not a super common occurrence, either. “What would I be agreeing to if I said yes?”

The old man held up two fingers in a peace sign in lieu of anything actually informative. “I’m Cap’n Cuttlefish! Leader of the legendary Squidbeak Splatoon! Defender of Inkopolis against the terror that is the Octarians! They’ve stolen the city’s power source, the Zapfish, and no one but me knows it!”

Caspian wasn’t afraid to give the guy an incredulous glower. He’d only heard the term “Octarian” in history textbooks. Of course someone this old, a veteran of the Great War, would be seeing them everywhere. And yeah, sure, the Great Zapfish was missing as of a couple days ago, and Caspian couldn’t recall it ever completely _disappearing_ from Inkopolis within his lifetime, but…it was a living being, and moved around sometimes. Who was anyone to begrudge it a change of scenery?

“Now, I’ve done my time fighting those Octojerks,” Cuttlefish continued, waving his cane in the air and forcing Caspian to lean out of range. “The Splatoon needs new blood if we’re gonna get back what’s ours. And we can’t afford to sit around. Without the Zapfish, the whole city will go dark, piece by piece.”

Was that a threat? Caspian allowed himself a scowl, and Cuttlefish lit up. “Gets you steamed, don’t it? I know the feeling all too well, kid. I need your help to prove to those fiends that they can’t touch our city!”

_Our city._ Caspian bitched and moaned about Inkopolis a lot, especially recently, but…at the end of the day, it was still his home. He’d never known anything else. Despite his skepticism, his judgement of Cuttlefish’s mental acuity, nothing would change that he didn’t want any harm to come to the city or its residents. With the possible exception of the guys he’d hidden from earlier. “You’re sure it’s the Octarians that stole the Zapfish.”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life!” Cuttlefish hobbled past him, to where the “street” Caspian had followed took a sharp turn to the right. He lifted his cane and poked at what looked like nothing but air a few inches above the asphalt. A clanging noise rewarded his efforts, and Caspian lurched back.

“These kettles are invisible until you ink ‘em,” Cuttlefish explained. “They lead to the underground domes where the Octarians live…and where they’re holding the Zapfish hostage. Couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!”

Warily, Caspian followed him, squinting at where the “kettle” was supposed to be. He tapped at it with the toe of his boot and felt solid resistance. Inklings were still a long way from this kind of technology… “What do you expect me to…where’d you get all that?”

Cuttlefish had an armful of clothes that he now held out to Caspian, a pleading look in his eyes. Caspian made a quiet groaning noise in the back of his throat, but reached out and took the pile. A black jacket with a reflective, fluorescent vest over it, like one a construction worker or crosswalk guard would wear. A pair of black sneakers with yellow highlights, much easier to run around in than the heavy combat boots he wore now. A headset of some kind, pulsating blue lights from the bases to the tips of the triangular earpieces. At least it all looked and smelled reasonably clean…

“It may not be…what do the kids say nowadays? ‘Fresh,’ and it may not be your style, but this hero gear will keep you safe. Made to withstand enemy ink coming at you at high velocities. You’ll thank me later.”

It was only now that the gravity of this situation sunk in. If Caspian was really going to be out fighting enemies over their power source…his enemies wouldn’t be some stupid high school Inkling screwing around in a basic turf war game. This was serious. This was _real._

“And say hello to your most important piece of hero equipment!” Now, out of nowhere, Cuttlefish procured two items: an ink tank, no different from the ones Caspian had seen and worn in turf war, and an actual weapon. It did most resemble a Splattershot than anything else, and had the same black-and-yellow color scheme, but Caspian was put off by the weird bulb with flashing lights attached by a stick to the top of the gun. He took it from Cuttlefish and turned it over in his hands. “I’ve never seen a shooter like this.”

“Call it an older model,” Cuttlefish said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “But it works just as well as anything else. Get suited up and try it out, why don’t you?”

With this he ambled away, back toward his shack, tossing quick glances over his shoulder as if he thought Caspian might take the opportunity to bolt. And he considered doing so, but one look at these metal structures branching into the sky quashed those thoughts. The invisible kettles, the grinding of machinery echoing out across this valley…something was up. He doubted it was really Octarians behind it all, but something, or someone, was. And now that Cuttlefish had literally handed him a weapon, his suspicions that the old man was trying to lure him to his death were fading little by little.

He shed his clothes, starting with his own black denim vest that already sported a few patches he had sewn on himself. The reflective yellow vest was a significant downgrade to his look, but he had to admit, it felt more durable, more ink-repellent. The shoes were a little tight, but not the least comfortable thing he’d ever worn, and they lit up green when he moved, which pleased his inner six-year-old. The jacket was also an inch or two too short, exposing his wrists, but there were worse things.

He hoisted the ink tank on over his shoulders and forced himself to relax, melt just a little bit, enough that his siphon would form on the base of his neck and he could stick the tank’s tube into it. His major ink vein dribbled its contents into the tank, and he tried not to shiver at the sensation of it leaving him. How did the professionals, the league teams, get used to this feeling?

The lights on the headset changed to green, matching his natural ink, the moment they touched his temples. It took him a while to get them appropriately adjusted, so they wouldn’t fly off his head when he shook it too violently. At last, fully suited up and clutching the weird gun, he found his way back to Cuttlefish’s shack.

The old man was waiting outside it, holding what looked like a walkie-talkie or something. As Caspian approached, his bulging eyes lit up again. “Look at you! Maybe not the _perfect_ fit, but pretty close, if I do say so myself. Go on, try out the hero shot.”

Caspian balanced the gun in his hands. A little top-heavy, neither sleek nor stylish, but as long as it played like a standard shooter, like what he was used to…He turned his back to Cuttlefish and aimed at the walls enclosing this space. He squeezed the trigger and green spattered the walls and ground. Despite himself, he grinned.

He went on the move, firing at the trees, diving into and out of the ink he left behind. Mobility was key, if his previous turf war experiences had taught him anything—never stay still. He jumped, trying to hit his imaginary targets as he fell back down. Behind him, Cuttlefish cheered, “You’re a natural!”

He’d covered most of the area in green in moments, but already his ink was beginning to dissolve from where he’d first fired. He aimed the shooter again, but the clunk of Cuttlefish’s cane on the ground stopped him.

“Don’t get too carried away, kid, your energy is better spent on the front lines.” He pointed out to the invisible kettle in the road. “You’re gonna be great out there, I can feel it! We’ll have the Zapfish back in no time!”

As Caspian turned to look at him, Cuttlefish raised his cane and tapped him lightly on the right shoulder. “Welcome to the New Squidbeak Splatoon, Agent Three.”

“Uh…thanks?” Caspian eyed the captain as his wariness creeped back over him. “What happened to Agents One and Two?”

Cuttlefish shrugged. “They’ve got their job, and you’ve got yours. Don’t worry about them. I’ll see if I can drag ‘em away from their responsibilities to come meet you in person one of these days. In the meantime…”

Caspian turned back to the kettle, but instead his guitar case caught his eye. “My bass—”

“Don’t worry about that either,” Cuttlefish said, hobbling in its direction. “It’ll be safe here with me.”

“It better be. It’s the most important thing in the world to me.” Caspian loomed over Cuttlefish’s shoulder as he came to a stop beneath the tree. “If it gets so much as a scratch, old man…”

“That’s Cap’n to you,” Cuttlefish retorted. “I know exactly what you musician types are like, kid. No harm shall befall your instrument as long as I live and breathe.”

Caspian still wasn’t convinced he wouldn’t keel over and die right here and now, but managed to hold his tongue this time. “Good. Don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it. And…” He stooped down to snatch his notebook off the ground where he’d dropped it. “If I think you’ve gone through this,” he jabbed a finger at it, “it won’t just be the Octarians who find themselves on the business end of my gun, got it?”

Cuttlefish snorted. “Yeah, yeah. Why don’t you save your threats for the enemy? You angsty teens…”

“I’m not _angsty!”_ Caspian shot the old squid a glare that went totally ignored, gave up, and stuffed the notebook back into its pocket. He handed off the case, hoping Cuttlefish wouldn’t buckle under its weight, and felt like he was abandoning a piece of his soul with this stranger. _Is this what parents feel like when they send their kids off to school for the first time?_

“You won’t be alone out there,” Cuttlefish said, tapping his ear and winking. Caspian remembered the radio he’d been holding a minute ago, and sure enough Cuttlefish’s voice came crackling through the headset. “I know all their dirty tricks. Keep a cool head and the Zapfish are as good as ours!”

Go time. Caspian stood up a little straighter, shifted his weapon’s weight in his hands, and turned his eye on the kettle. He fired a few shots, and the cloaking technology wore away with each splatter of ink. He stood over the now visible metal grate and peered inside: pitch black, impossible to see into, but from within rose the scraping noise of active machinery and muffled, pounding _boom_ s that echoed the anxious thudding of his hearts. His throat went dry.

Cuttlefish was watching him, he felt the old man’s gaze burn his skin. His headset came to life again. “Give ‘em hell, Agent Three. We’re counting on you.”

Caspian closed his eyes, took a deep breath of the valley’s fresh air, and dove inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will admit this is kind of a filler-y chapter but these next couple ones are, uh, _heavy_ so take the levity while you can. plus i think a break from being inside topsail's head is beneficial. also writing pissy-teenage-splat-1-era caspian was Very fun for me and i will not apologize


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome back! this chapter comes with a content warning for intentional misgendering and just general (verbal, non-violent) transphobia. it's not fun, but i found it cathartic to write. this also isn't the last time those themes will appear but i will give content warnings in the notes like this every time it comes up. if there's a better way i can handle this let me know

Topsail regarded Red’s apartment door like an inmate would the electric chair.

He could do nothing else to prepare; he’d taken off his lab coat and unclipped his badge from his hip, leaving both in his car, so as to not appear pretentious or like he was rubbing his job in Red’s face. And luckily the shirt he’d picked out at random yesterday morning was just solid black, plainer than plain, giving no indication that he had any interests or enjoyed his life. Stripping himself down until he was barely a person was the only way Red would tolerate him. And even then…

He knocked. The thud of his knuckles against the wood resonated throughout his entire body as if he were just a hollow shell. The echo in his head rang out long after the quiet sound had ceased. His death knell. 

To his surprise, the door opened almost immediately—Red didn’t make him wait for him to shamble across his entire apartment. Maybe he wanted this to be over just as much as Topsail did. But he did not reveal himself to Topsail, hiding behind the door as he opened it, giving him an unobstructed view of his apartment: spotless and tastefully furnished. The cleanliness wasn’t really a surprise, he knew this assisted-living complex had custodial crews visit on a weekly basis, but it did take him aback that this place where Red had lived for the better part of a decade didn’t show any signs of life.

“Get in here,” the door growled in Octarian.

Topsail had barely stepped over the threshold before Red slammed the door behind him. Topsail turned and tried not to flinch. Red had always cut an intimidating figure, tall and lean even by Octoling standards. Crimson ink and maroon eyes, hence the nickname. The accident hadn’t made him look or act any friendlier.

The skin on almost his entire left side, from his temple down to somewhere on his torso, was mottled and splotchy, the discoloration uneven and jarring against the rest of his pale complexion. These chemical burns were a decade old now, but Topsail would never get used to them. Every time he had seen Red in public, he’d worn an eyepatch, but Topsail alone was clearly not important enough to bother dressing up for. The scarred skin and the indentation where Red’s left eye would have been fixed Topsail as if it were still there, glaring at him. The intention was obvious: _this is your fault._

Ten years ago, he had believed him. Took the bait, because of course he did, as a twelve-year-old with deep-set, debilitating self-esteem issues. Now, years after the fact, years of growth, years of Atlanta’s gentle but unfailing support, Topsail was less eager to throw himself on the sword Red so generously offered. 

Red was otherwise dressed in sweats and a ratty t-shirt that looked as old as the human band its logo depicted. He was the only one out of their whole group to keep the military hairstyle aboveground, a single tentacle down the center of his head like a mohawk. His good eye was as piercing as ever, never failed to make Topsail feel like he was still a bumbling child, years out from uprighting. But this time he stood his ground, met Red’s gaze evenly, didn’t dare even hint at any emotion.

“I am only wasting my breath on you because it’s Atlanta’s orders.” Red never shouted, it was too much energy, but the stoniness of his voice accomplished quite the same effect.

 _She’s not your leader anymore._ Topsail decided not to commit suicide by voicing this kneejerk thought and instead said, “I know. The green goo is back.”

Red jerked his head toward him, but his voice was as flat and disinterested as ever. “Is it.”

“We’re going to kill it this time. We need to know how.”

A sarcastic, derisive laugh would have been an excellent response to this, but Red never laughed. He turned his back without another word and stalked further into his apartment. It was the closest Topsail would get to an invitation, so he followed.

Red seated himself at his kitchen table, and Topsail took the other wooden chair on the opposite side. Dirty dishes, empty prescription bottles, and old, coffee-stained newspapers littered the table. So Red did _live_ here after all, but…newspaper had largely been phased out of Inkopolis as of, like, seven years ago. Red wasn’t even thirty, and the furthest thing from technophobic, what use would he have for this outdated stuff? Topsail knew better than to ask.

“You’re even more of an idiot than I thought if you think you can put that stuff down for good.” Red stared right through Topsail, drumming his claws on the table.

“I’m not entirely convinced it’s possible, myself. But the alternative is to do nothing.”

“Then maybe you ought to do nothing. What help will _you_ be in this fight?”

Topsail fought the urge to roll his eyes. Sometimes he entertained the possibility that Red was his very own divine punishment—the result of some higher being with a sick sense of humor nudging another and whispering, “wouldn’t it be funny if we breathed life into this guy’s self-loathing?” There was nothing Red could say to him that he hadn’t already thought himself. But then, if Red knew that, he’d take it as a challenge.

Topsail kept his tone even as he replied, “I’m fully aware I’m not much of a fighter. What I do best is collect information. Know thy enemy.”

Red scoffed. “A lot of good that’ll do you when it crawls inside your head.”

“That’s the point. If we prepare adequately, it won’t come to that, and if it does—”

“Oh, shut up.” Red’s lip curled, revealing sharp, asymmetric teeth. “If I couldn’t outsmart it, _you_ have no hope.”

“It took you off-guard. None of us were expecting it, or even knew it was there, but now we do. Now we have more of an idea of what it’s capable of. And that’s where you come in.”

Red’s eye flashed. “What do you want from me?”

And now commenced Topsail’s funeral. He tried to make his nervous inhalation less obvious. “I need to know what it did to you, and how. In as much detail as you can give me.”

Red just stared, as if Topsail hadn’t said anything at all. He sank his teeth into his tongue, to control the instinct to apologize, to take it back. His statement sat heavy in the air, draining the room of the summer heat.

Red spoke an eternity later, his voice icy and toneless. “You were there.”

“I…don’t remember much.” This wasn’t even a lie; whenever Topsail reached back in time to that day, he retrieved many more emotions than concrete memories. The terror he’d experienced he could relive fresh at any time, but he could not recall even a basic sequence of events—in his recollection, everything was dark and muddled and happened all at once. “Besides, it’s not about me. You, uh, you got the worst of it. You know better than anyone what it does. And, crucially, how to make it stop.”

Red was scowling, and for once, Topsail knew why he deserved it. “You come uninvited into my home and ask me to divulge all the details of my worst trauma. What is wrong with you—besides the obvious?”

“I’m not doing this for fun,” Topsail ground out, fire collecting in his face.

“I don’t care why. You have no right to ask anything of me, _ever.”_ Red’s tapping fingers had clenched into a fist on the table. “How fucking delusional are you?”

Topsail maintained a poker face, but his tentacles twitched, betraying his innards twisting at the use of that word. Far from the first time Red had called him delusional. But all the other times, it had been used in a different context, and he felt this conversation, if it could be called that, tilting that direction yet again. And that subject was one on which he would not, would _never_ compromise.

This would end very badly.

Red didn’t disappoint, letting another humorless scoff escape his gritted teeth. “Of course, I know full well you’re not based in any reality.”

“Stop.” Topsail’s hunch had been right. He hoped the sharpness with which he spoke the single word would make it come off more as a command, and not a plea. “I didn’t come here to get into this with you.”

“I don’t _care,”_ Red repeated, squeezing his fist so tightly veins popped in the back of his hand. “You think you’re some big _man_ now, huh? Talking yourself up, thinking you can play the hero. But you know just as well as I do who you really are.”

He spoke a name with the intent to kill.

“That’s not my name, _Red.”_ The raw, white-hot anger that welled up within Topsail’s stomach and chest was not enough to wash away the _shame_ that struck him, burrowed its way into his very center, his skin splitting around the impact. “If I can call you by a nickname, you can—”

“No.” Red never smiled, but Topsail could feel the smug sneer in his lone eye, and he burned. “At your core, you are a coward, a deadweight, and now a liar. You act like you’ve changed, like you _can_ change, but you will always be that useless little girl who slowed us down, who put us all in danger. And you know it.”

Some alien pressure was building right behind Topsail’s eyes, in his chest, and he fought to breathe. He didn’t consider himself a violent person, but as he dug his claws into the meat of his palms beneath the table, the darkest crevices of his mind gained ground against his rationality. He wondered how it would feel to, just this once, sink his fist deep into Red’s scarred face. He didn’t dare speak.

The resulting silence only fueled Red. “Gonna go cry to Atlanta again? Have her save you, since you can’t fight your own battles? Fucking _pathetic._ ” His hands were shaking, his cheeks tinged blue. “How did you get her to play along with these lies? She should know better—she always should have known better! But every time, she sides with you.”

“Keep her out of this,” Topsail snapped. The pressure beating against his temples eased for just a moment, but he could barely tell over his blood boiling, over the venom that built up on his tongue. “It isn’t about her.”

“Oh, yeah, right, it needs to always be about _you!”_ Red bared his teeth, his eyes alight. “I’ve always seen right through you. So desperately clawing for anything that’ll hide how worthless you are—well, you can’t fool me. You’re not a hero. You’re not my friend. And even though you’ve spent all these years faking it, even though you’ve mutilated your body like you have, you will never be a real man either—"

 _“You shut the fuck up!”_ Topsail was suddenly standing, bracing himself over the edge of the table, his tentacles lashing against his forehead. “If you had even the most infinitesimal idea of what I went through to get here, what I’m _still_ fighting for tooth and nail, every damn day of my life, you’d _beg_ for my forgiveness! But that would require you to think about someone other than yourself for once, so that’s never gonna happen!”

Red wore a look on his face like Topsail had threatened to gouge out his other eye. Topsail distantly recognized he’d crossed probably a million lines, but his mouth was lightyears ahead of his brain and showed no signs of stopping.

“Nobody’s actually a _person_ to you, are they? Everyone’s either an obstacle or a scapegoat, put solely on this earth to piss you off! Are you really surprised you’re so fucking miserable all the time? Is it such a shock that you feel like you’re wasting your life when you spend all day with your hectocotylus in your hand, pretending like it’s everyone else’s fault you’re like this? I could’ve told you years ago that getting off to your own suffering is a shitty idea, but it’s so _beneath_ you to listen to anyone who isn’t Atlanta—and, just so you know, she’s _never_ gonna fuck you, so—”

 _“QUIET!”_ Red all but leaped to his feet, his roar ringing around the bare walls of the kitchen—pettily, Topsail hoped he’d get a noise complaint. “You keep running your mouth in my own house, see where that gets you! I’m not about to let some—some sick-in-the-head freak who doesn’t even know what she _is_ lecture me about what I do with my life! You would’ve been institutionalized in the domes, you know, but here, in this _utopia_ that is the surface, you instead have the freedom to surround yourself with enablers. And I, likewise, have the freedom to do whatever the _fuck_ I want without being chastised by a bleating idiot who thinks she’s a man!”

That stung, honestly, but even through his own reactive rage, Topsail clung to the word “surface,” and remembered why he was here at all. “Yeah, well, you can kiss that freedom goodbye when the goo escapes the underground! It’s worse than it was—it’ll contaminate Inkopolis, and we won’t know how to stop it, and people will die! They’ll go through exactly what you did, and it’ll be the last thing they ever know! I came here for information that will save _lives,_ Red!”

His hearts thundered, making his fingers twitch, his claws scraping against the layer of newspaper on the table. His chest was empty, and the vacuum made it cave in on itself. The heat that had rushed him evaporated just as quickly, leaving him with nothing.

He took in a shuddering breath. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you. But neither does anyone else. And…I know what I just said, but…you do care about other people. I know you do. If I really thought you didn’t, if I thought there was no chance you’d ever give up anything of yours for the sake of others, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

The scowl Red shot him in response nearly made him flinch. His mouth and his words ran dry in the same instant, so he turned his back, hoped that the sudden tremors in his hands were confined to just there and not the rest of his body. On cue, the regret started to sink in, a feeling like lead weighing down his every vein. Red was sure to bitch about him to Atlanta, and she’d be so disappointed in him for losing his temper like he always did, _I thought you were better than this,_ she’d say _…_ what had this accomplished? Wasting time, making Red hate him even more. He was every bit as stupid as Red said he was.

His hand was on the doorknob when Red spoke. “Music.”

Every cell in Topsail’s body froze. He risked a glance over his shoulder, convinced he’d just imagined Red’s voice again. “What?” he whispered.

Red’s eye was squeezed shut, his palm covering the scar tissue over the left side of his face, as if it pained him to even think about it. Maybe it did. His voice was rough, hollow.

“When it got to me. Got inside me. Took me over. It dug so deep in me that it unearthed parts of me I didn’t even know were there.” He swallowed, and grimaced like it stuck in his throat, but if Topsail hadn’t known any better, he’d have mistaken it for a smile. “When I was a kid, my ma would sing me this lullaby every night she’d put me to bed. I’d forgotten about it completely, hadn’t even thought about it in ten years, but…that goo shit dug it up, and suddenly that song, her voice, was all I could think about. It was in my ears, in my veins, and the goo _hated_ it. And it fought. But the music was too strong. The goo lost its complete control over me after that. I could slow down enough for Atlanta to shoot it off.”

He pulled his hands away from his face, his eye glittering.

The story hung in the air like a storm cloud, and its electric tension made it hard for Topsail to breathe. So many questions filled his head, and he could put his voice to none of them, except one. He’d be fortunate to ask it without Red jumping the table to deck him. But he’d test his luck. “Have…have you ever told anyone else about this?”

Red’s shoulders rose and fell. His eye bore into the opposite side of the table, in Topsail’s general direction but not actually at him. “No.”

Topsail swallowed. It had no effect on the dryness of his mouth. “Thank you.”

“Shut up.” Though Red glared at him, the words seemed less barbed this time. Obligatory, more than spoken out of pure malice. “If you lose your fight, if you let my experience go to waste…you better hope it kills you before I do. Now get the fuck out of my house.”

Topsail didn’t need to be told twice. He closed the door behind him and made it a few steps away before collapsing against the wall, his head spinning. How could _this_ be the solution? Of all the weaknesses for the goo to have…it didn’t make sense. Red could have lied. He must have lied. He’d never hand Topsail something so personal, something that painted him so vulnerable.

But maybe…

It was a beautiful day. Topsail reflected on this on the way back to his car, his steps slowing. The sun beat down, but in the aftermath of Topsail’s Red-induced perpetual anxiety attack, he welcomed the heat, hoped it would make his fingers less numb. The air was as fresh as it could possibly be in the city—Topsail may have been spoiled by the less urban Bigfin, and Octo Canyon—but breathing it in soothed him just a little. People were out and about around him, carrying bags of groceries, walking nudibranchs on leashes. He’d never paid much attention to Red’s neighbors before, but as he people-watched, it began to dawn on him that most of them were middle-aged at least…and many of them were Octolings.

He’d never _seen_ so many Octolings at once—not on the surface, anyway. Practically every other person he saw was one. And many of them bore scars like his, marks across their faces and necks. They walked with limps or assistance. They wore masks that covered the lower half of their faces, like the ones he’d occasionally see on teenage Inklings in the square. He unconsciously thumbed his jaw where he knew his skin was scarred.

He’d fought tooth and nail to carve out his niche in the world. He clung to the space he created, had made his own, like his life depended on it. He didn’t allow himself to feel out of place very much anymore, or else his efforts had been wasted. But here, when most of the people passing him by looked just like him…the pressure to fight eased. He had a place here. He stood at their shoulders. They saw him, nodded, smiled, and went on their way. Acknowledged, but not singled out. Blended in, but not lost.

He sat at the wheel in his car for some time, listening to his own breathing, watching the tiny figures of distant Octolings walk around the complex. He couldn’t give up his stake in the Inkling world, not after he’d bled for it. Not yet. But maybe one day…

He returned to the world he knew.

-

“We can’t bring her along. She’ll only slow us down.”

Red’s input did not surprise Atlanta in the least. She’d seen the way his eyes narrowed at the young Octoling when she stumbled out of the shadows. The kid had scared the ink out of them all—if they’d been followed by a juvenile who hadn’t even uprighted, who else could be on their trail? Atlanta’s skin crawled. This place, this bizarre labyrinth of corroding metal half-swallowed by the earth, of enormous fissures with water rushing through their depths, of darkness and musty air when they craved real sunlight and the whispering breeze—Atlanta was no longer sure she hadn’t made a mistake, leading her team into this uncharted territory, this inevitable danger. And now…

The kid’s watery eyes darted from shadow to creeping shadow, shooting wary glances at the older Octolings before just as quickly looking away. Atlanta’s heart ached. The poor girl knew they were all talking about her, and had no reason to believe they were saying anything good.

She turned to her other teammates—her best friends, all of them, whose lives she had saved and who had saved her time and time again. She had never once been afraid to rely on them. “Your thoughts?”

As expected, Coral was the first to offer her opinion without any further prompting or awkward silence. “I do see where Red’s coming from.”

Red scowled, already hearing the implicit “but.”

Coral dropped her volume and leaned more heavily on her splatling. “Do you see what she’s wearing?” she hissed, waving a hand vaguely in the stranger’s direction. “That’s a full uniform. How old did she say she was, twelve?”

Atlanta nodded and Red rolled his eyes. “You’re reading too much into it. She stole it, I bet. Octarian leather’s better than any street clothes when doing something this dangerous.”

“No way!” Coral’s rose-pink tentacles curled inward with her indignance. “Do you have _eyes,_ Red? Her leather’s a perfect fit. No squishy would be able to fit in a uniform designed for someone who’s uprighted. That stuff was made special. Someone in the domes made it special.”

Red could try all he liked to intimidate Coral with his usual glare, but they all knew it wouldn’t work, she was far too used to it. He gave up, sniffing, “Fine. Yeah, it’s messed up that they’re…making military armor for kids. That’s why we’re leaving.”

 _Think on it a little more,_ Atlanta wanted to plead with him, but she wouldn’t confront him just yet. The last fourth of her team had yet to speak. He’d scarcely taken his eyes from the kid at all, actually. She cleared her throat. “Adrian, stop staring. It’s creepy.”

He almost yelped and whipped around to face her, almost dropping his octobrush in the process. “Sorry! I’m not—I was just—” He breathed in and let it out in a huff, the black tentacle down the center of his head twitching. No amount of Octarian army discipline would ever change that he startled easily, or ran his mouth when he was nervous, but now at least he knew when to cut himself off. “She looks familiar to me. I…I don’t really know why. I just feel like I’ve…seen her from afar a lot?”

Atlanta gave her other teammates a questioning eye. Coral seemed to share her confusion, but Red squinted at the kid again (even from this distance, the poor thing flinched away).

“You think you’ve seen her?” Coral repeated, not quite scathing but pretty close. “You saw a squishy decked out in army leather and didn’t think anything of it until now?”

“I wasn’t being literal! I was trying to say that it’s all…vague and blurry!”

Uninterested in their bickering, Atlanta turned her attention back to Red. She could tell by the way his claws tapped the chassis of his charger that he was focused. Breaking his concentration was a great way to further piss him off, but she could also tell his unabashed staring at the young Octoling was probably terrifying her…

His movements stopped and he stiffened.

“Red?”

“Dark blue like that is a rare natural ink color.” His words came out like stone.

“…Yes?”

“So is that bioluminescent pattern.”

“Right.” That was one of the first things Atlanta had noticed about the kid, actually. The glowing green ends of her tentacles were very eye-catching in the dark. It was an uncommon pattern, but not unheard of. “What’s your point?”

“I only know one person with both those traits.” Red kept staring, kept his back turned to his team. “One of my commanding officers. What a weird coincidence.”

“For the seas’ sake, Red, what are you talking about?” Atlanta crossed her arms. “If you have something to say, say it. This ambiguity helps no one.”

“The cutting project.”

That was the _last_ thing Atlanta had expected to hear. Her hearts stopped. She sneaked a glance over her shoulder and saw her surprise reflected in the widened eyes of her other teammates. She couldn’t allow the stunned silence to take over, but she had no words.

“Oh my god,” Coral mumbled through the hand that now covered her mouth. “That would explain the clothes.”

“And why she’s so heavily involved in the military before she’s even uprighted,” Adrian chimed in.

Red finally turned on his heel to face the rest, his eyes ablaze. “We are _not_ traveling with a runaway cutting. The entire army will be out in force by sunup, searching for her. We _will_ get caught.”

Coral and Adrian exchanged a glance, and then both turned expectantly to Atlanta. She tried not to show that she was drowning—a _cutting,_ it was _impossible_ , but how else…?

“Atlanta, listen to me.” Red now turned on her specifically. He gripped his charger so tightly his knuckles were turning white. “All of us combined aren’t half as valuable as a cutting. They will stop at nothing to find her. If we’re caught with her, we’re as good as dead.”

Atlanta’s voice finally returned to her. She met Red evenly, though she could tell by the steel in his eyes that this would not be an easy argument. “We knew that going in. We knew this would be dangerous, even life-threatening. Right?” She glanced back at Adrian and Coral, who both nodded in synch.

“I agreed to help _us_ find our way to the surface,” Red snapped. “I did not agree to bring along a stranger—a child who clearly can’t fend for herself, and who will lure the people we’re trying to escape directly to us! How can you risk us, your teammates, for her sake?”

Atlanta let herself breathe, willed the tension to slip out of her shoulders and her clenched fists. “If she can’t fight for herself, someone must fight for her.”

“It can’t be us.”

“Why not?” Years of training kept Atlanta’s tone level, even if she wanted to do nothing but grab Red by the shoulders and shake him, _you’re so shortsighted_ — “We’re already out of the domes. We’re already in massive trouble if they find us. Her goal and ours are the same. I don’t see how this would make it any worse.”

“It can _always_ get worse!” Red shook his head amidst a growl. “She is a liability, Atlanta! We’ll waste our time and energy, carrying her. Just this once, think beyond your bleeding hearts!”

Atlanta felt herself go cold. Even Red seemed to realize he’d crossed a line, as his eyes widened. Distantly behind her, she heard one of the others inhale sharply. She stepped forward and Red backed up. “This is the problem. You see her as a burden. I see her as a person in need of help.” Another step, and Red didn’t back away this time, straightened up even, as if to highlight the several inches he had on her. An intimidating display to anyone else, but not her.

“I just—shouldn’t we—take care of our own first?”

“She _is_ our own. What’s the difference? Haven’t we all been reduced to gears in the war machine? Aren’t we doing all of this in the hopes that life on the surface more resembles, or is even better than, the civilian lives we remember? Why doesn’t she deserve that chance, too?”

She looked beyond Red to the young Octoling in question, who nervously pulled the ends of her almost-fully-developed head-tentacles. “If she _is_ a cutting—which is a ridiculous conjecture, by the way--she was literally born into the military. It’s all she knows. And yet, here she is, willing to leave her entire world behind without even knowing for sure that there are better things out there. I can’t…I can’t turn my back on her. I won’t.”

Red had grit his teeth, his lips peeled back. “But you have to acknowledge that taking her with puts us all in danger—more danger than without.”

“Fine. I do acknowledge that. I’m asking you to take on yet another responsibility. I’m sorry.” Atlanta closed her eyes for a moment, bringing the earthy air into her chest and feeling like the little particles coated her insides. She hated that she was forcing her teammates into this position. But the alternative? She’d never be able to live with herself, knowing she did nothing to help someone so desperately in need of an ally. “You can say no.”

Red’s glower darkened. She knew he was right to be skeptical.

“That’s my ultimatum. I will travel with her, alone if I have to. I will not force you to stick with me.”

Red wore his contempt for the world like a mask at all times, and it was jarring to see it fall away, to reveal dismay, _hurt._ Atlanta couldn’t look into his eyes anymore, but disguised her weakness as turning around to face the others. “The same goes for you both. Do what you like. I hold no ill will toward any of you should you choose to find the surface your own way.”

“I’m not leaving.” Adrian’s reply was immediate. He approached Atlanta to stand at her shoulder, staring down Red where she couldn’t.

And then Coral was at her other side, lugging her splatling the whole way. “Safety in numbers,” she said, joining Adrian in giving Red a pointed _look._

Truthfully, Atlanta had expected at least a little hesitance from her other teammates. Their willingness to have her back warmed her, returned to her the courage she needed. She faced Red again, holding her hands open. “We’re so much stronger with you than without, Red. I’ll respect if this is something you can’t compromise on, but…if you can stomach it, we need you. Now more than ever. Please.”

Red bristled, a vein popping in his forehead, but the next few moments of silence deflated him. He let out a growling kind of sigh from his throat and glared daggers at Atlanta. “Fine. When they catch us, you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.”

Atlanta gave him a smile. “ _If_ they catch us. Don’t forget we’re damn good at what we do.” She brushed past him, leading the way back toward the young Octoling, still awaiting them to return from their team huddle. She couldn’t help but beam as she turned back to her friends, meeting their eyes in turn, Red’s…red, Coral’s pale blue, Adrian’s rich brown. “Let’s go properly introduce ourselves this time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm probably preaching to the choir here but the choice to refer to this "young octoling" during flashbacks as "she" is purely because the narrative is from the other characters' perspective. if it was from his point of view i'd still call him he, even if he hadn't come out yet. if you're talking about a trans person during a time before they came out it's appropriate to still use their current name and pronouns even if that's not what they were using at the time.
> 
> anyway that's my soapbox. i don't know why i create complete bastards like red and then fall for them really hard. also i'm so glad i get to post a chapter all about octolings on 8/8
> 
> google "hectocotylus"


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not even gonna lie this is probably my personal favorite chapter. but it does come with another content warning for more intentional misgendering and, uh, familial issues, so be wary if you're sensitive to that.
> 
> also, with the intent of transparency, i am tossing my upload schedule out the window. from now on i post chapters when i feel like it. they will be less frequent than they have been. long story short i technically got promoted at work, this has been my first month alone in this new position, and i am working Much longer hours than i have been, even pre-lockdown. i love the work i do but it's 1. unpredictable, 2. my workload varies from day to day and when there's a lot to do i can easily pull multiple 12 to 13 hour "shifts" in a row, and obviously that's pretty physically and mentally exhausting for me. i do not have the energy to spare on my creative efforts when that happens, unfortunately. i debated going on hiatus until i can get my shit together and actually finish writing the last third of this fic but i also don't want to leave y'all hanging. i still have a significant amount of material to go before i truly hit this dead end and i don't want to, like, withhold that from you (read: i Need the attention). so i'm just gonna slow down posting new chapters rather than call it off altogether. we'll see if i still run out. i hope not. sorry to be so flaky about updates but i truly did not see any of this coming

Caspian and Maya playfully bantered all throughout their travel back through Inkopolis to the secret grate, but Topsail paid attention to none of their words. He was drowning inside his own head, turning over Red’s story, as if things would just _click_ if he kept thinking in circles.

Even a false lead was better than the nothing they currently had, though. He tried to cobble together what he might say, how he might bring this up… _so you know how I said I’d never seen this type of thing before? That was a complete lie…_

The underground launch into Octo Canyon was no less tumultuous than the first few times Topsail had experienced it, but he didn’t have the mental capacity to let it bother him like it had before. He stuck the landing, was on his feet and moving the second his body allowed it.

Eight was sitting cross-legged beneath the shade of a tree on the opposite side of the cabin, a laptop balanced on their knees, furiously typing away. Topsail felt obligated to keep his distance, remained a meter or two behind the two agents as they approached. Caspian awkwardly cleared his throat while Maya chirped, “Sup, Eight?”

Eight jumped and slammed the screen shut. “Ah—oh, it’s you. How is your arm, Four?”

Maya grinned and rotated it like she were winding up to throw a punch. “Dude, that medtech stuff is like magic. I feel great! Hand me my dualies and I’ll prove it.”

“Let us not get too ahead of ourselves,” Eight said. “I am glad you feel better, but this initial reduction of pain may not last, especially since you have been wearing it for so little. I would give it longer.”

Maya shrugged, apparently not feeling great enough to die on this hill. “You got it, doc.”

“What’re you doing?” Caspian gestured at the laptop and Eight shushed him, pushing it aside and standing up.

“Do not be so obvious,” they hissed under their breath, glancing over his shoulder at the cabin.

Caspian raised an eyebrow. “Alright, never mind. Just don’t forget to delete your browser history.”

“Shut up!” Eight gave him a glare without any real bite to it, and he grinned. Topsail didn’t think he’d ever seen such an open, genuine smile from him before. The thoughts that plagued him vanished like water down a drain, gone for good. His hearts thundered and his stomach filled with a nervous fluttering. He tried to focus what was left of his brain solely on Eight’s next words.

“I do not feel great about it, but…Commander has given me no information on who she is.” They plucked at the wrists of their gloves, their eyes locked on the cabin beyond. “She is—or was, an elite. She has the insight into the workings of the Octarian army, its recent activity, that no one else here does. I can’t just…leave it alone.” They stooped down to pick the laptop off the ground and opened it.

“Wait, so you have dirt on her?” Maya’s eyes glowed like the sun above.

“You could say that.” Eight’s eyes flicked over the top of the computer to hers, their brows coming together. “I only have access to the Octarian military records Cap’n Cuttlefish gave to me when he retired. It was in the hope that maybe some of it would help my memory…which has not been the case, but at least it is serving a different purpose now. This information is…somewhat sensitive. It is not readily available to the Octarian public, or even most of the army, but it also does not tell the full story.”

They turned their laptop around to reveal the screen—two-column walls of Octarian text, broken up only by brackets containing the word “REDACTED.” Topsail squinted, finding it difficult to read between the tiny font and the glare from the sunlight. Caspian and Maya, meanwhile, exchanged clear “what the hell am I looking at” glances.

“We have not had success in recovering the original, uncensored versions of these documents,” Eight sighed. “But it is better than nothing, I suppose…and, no, there is no dossier on me,” they added as Caspian opened his mouth. “Cap’n Cuttlefish’s library is incomplete. It mostly contains elites, and otherwise soldiers who spent many, many years in the army, so…I am not there.”

The sympathetic look that crossed Caspian’s face made Topsail avert his eyes, and he wasn’t even the one it was directed at. “Sorry, Eight.”

“It is fine.” It probably wasn’t, if the way Caspian almost winced suggested anything, but Eight gave them no time to dwell on it. They turned the laptop back around to face them. “I have read Commander’s profile through many times since finding it. It is so heavily censored, and the pieces that remain only give more questions, not answer them. But we know this: she joined at age 16, and impressed her higher-ups with her charger skills that they let her advance much more quick than normal. Then…” They cleared their throat and read the text, translating it to Inkling for the other agents’ sakes. “’At age 19, agreed to participate in [REDACTED]…resulting in the creation of Subject 44-3157.’ I have no idea what that means.”

A black hole opened in Topsail’s abdomen, draining his face of blood, swallowing the heat in the summer air. His fingers and toes and tongue all went numb. He stopped breathing as the world fell apart around him.

No one noticed. Eight continued, “That is succeeded by a huge amount of redacted text. Then it goes back to talking about her assignments and advancements in the army—”

“The. The. The subject thing.” It was impossible to speak when his tongue was full of needles, when his head had broken into a thousand pieces a million miles apart. His voice was too quiet even though a scream sat ready at the base of his throat. He didn’t know when he’d started shaking, full-body tremors that were impossible not to notice—Eight’s eyebrows had furrowed and he felt presences on his either side, not quite touching him but close. “Is there—is there any, anything more about that at all? A link or a reference or something, _anything?”_ His voice broke.

“It’s just text.” Eight tapped at their keyboard, and a second later shook their head. “That term does not appear in the file again. Are…you okay?”

The numeric sequence he had answered to for twelve years was singeing the crevices in his brain, clouding his thoughts with acrid smoke. The ID number was his name, the _real_ one—he and his peers had standard, alphabetical names too, but not many of the Octarian doctors and scientists and officers used them. The ones that did tended to be nicer. He’d thought it was normal, that everyone had a subject-number as an alias, until he met Atlanta and the others, who had no idea what he was talking about. Until he came to the surface, where no Inkling ever asked him his number instead of his name, or gave their own. He learned that up here, names take precedence, and banished the number into the depths of his memory.

He didn’t want to remember this.

 _Resulting in the creation of…_ what the _fuck_ was that supposed to mean? This new information combined with the resurrection of the old, everything he’d thought he’d abandoned underground, buried and gone…his breathing was coming in short bursts. He’d knotted the fingers of one hand in his tentacles, both appendages shivering against each other.

“Okay, I think we need to take a step back.” Maya spoke gently, but Topsail’s own building rage, a frustrated paroxysm against the way his past still shackled him, twisted it into condescension in his ears.

 _“No!”_ he snapped, whirling around to face her with his teeth bared. “I need _answers.”_

He turned on Eight next, and felt something like satisfaction when they met him not with compassion, but with steel. “Who is she?”

Eight held his gaze, blinked once. They turned the laptop back around to face him, scrolling up to the top of the dossier.

A picture of Commander—he thought it was an older one, but he based that more on the compression artifacts of the image than how she looked. He could barely tell _what_ she looked like, given the entire upper half of her face was covered by some blocky piece of gear, over her eyes. Her tentacles were still blue, still cropped short to her head, still decorated with strands of seaweed. She was not smiling.

His eyes drifted to the text below. Every vein in his body, ink and blood alike, turned to ice.

_Name: Plectrono, Tatiana._

Again the world ground to a slow halt, but this time everyone saw. His knees hit the dirt. Hands were on him, on his shoulders and his arms, holding him upright. Caspian’s touch on his left only compounded his sudden lightheadedness.

Eight pulled the laptop away from him on panicked reflex, as if they thought they’d stabbed him with it. The impenetrable expression they’d worn a second ago melted away in an instant. “Wh—what is it?!”

Topsail’s throat had closed, which was just as well, as no words in either language existed to him anymore. He was connected to the present moment by one fraying thread.

Maya’s fingers tightened around his right arm, but even though she was only inches away, her voice was distant. “I won’t pretend I can read Octarian very well, so…Eight, can you verify for all of us what it says her name is?”

“She will not like that we know it.” Eight shot her an incredulous look, but nevertheless dropped their volume. “It says Tatiana Plectrono. I don’t—”

“Thanks. Is that a common Octarian surname?”

“No?” Now Eight’s skepticism crossed the line into full disbelief. “Why would you think that it…”

Their eyes darted back and forth from the screen to Topsail as they spoke, and as their sentence died they covered their mouth with one hand. “Wait. No. No, that cannot be possible…but…”

When they met his eyes he almost flinched away. They swallowed, and whispered in Octarian, **“Did you know?”**

He had no idea what face he wore, but it was answer enough. The weird mix of horror and pity with which they were regarding him made him want to scream until his throat bled, or toss himself into the endless chasms below these Octarian cliffs. They stared at him with hollow eyes, shaking their head so slightly he almost thought he imagined it. They murmured, **“I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”**

“Anyone wanna tell me what the fuck is going on?” The gruffness of Caspian’s voice was so _normal_ that Topsail found himself clinging to it with all his might.

Eight swallowed again, and closed their laptop with twitchy claws. “There is evidence to suggest that Commander and Topsail are…biologically related.”

Hearing even that innocuous, and irrefutable, statement spoken aloud was like taking a splatling round to the face. Topsail could only shrink into himself so much without actually going basal, and the thought was looking more and more tempting by the second.

“So she’s his mom,” Maya said, and _that_ word skewered all three of his hearts.

“It is not that simple.” Eight chewed their lip as they spoke, Topsail didn’t need to see their face to tell. “I mean, it is a reasonable analogy, but…it’s not the same. It would be easiest to call it in Inkling…the cutting process. Topsail is a cutting. He is _her_ cutting.”

The word tore him through, and from the resulting hole spilled forgotten memories of hearing the adults whisper it when they thought he was out of earshot, echoing around corners of the long, gray hallways. Most said it so matter-of-factly. He’d never realized that it meant something. That it meant _him._

“Cutting?” Maya repeated, an edge to her tone that suggested she hadn’t just misheard. “That makes it sound like she…you know, just lopped off a tentacle. How does _that_ translate into…?”

“Yes.” Eight paused, putting their words together. “The cutting process is used to mass-produce the basic Octarians you have fought—the Octotroopers and so on. It only takes a tentacle, or even a portion of one, and a very precise mix of chemicals to animate it. But they are different from us because of it. They do not feel and they do not think like you and I do. The military treats them as disposable. It is…uncomfortable, looking back.” They gave a little breath of flat, joyless laughter.

More silence as Eight planned their explanation. Topsail wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear it, but he could get up and leave no easier than he could sprout wings and fly away.

“In the army, there were…rumors. Like that they had tried to give life to Octolings in the same way, with a donor tentacle and that same chemical concoction. A discontinued experiment. ‘The cutting project.’ Who would…who would believe such a thing? That they had grown a functional, complex brain—a _person!_ —in the same vats they grow Tentakooks. Even supposing it was true, and the project was a success—as if we would ever hear the end of it! They would not have even needed to recruit civilian Octolings if even the army elites could just…just…be manufactured…”

Topsail would have been sick if all of his innards hadn’t turned to stone. His breathing rattled in his chest and his vision swam—was he crying? His mind was so blank, so dead, that he couldn’t even be embarrassed about his utter collapse, and that was a first. He used to be so good at hiding his breakdowns.

Seconds crawled by. Either no one spoke or Topsail blocked out the words that passed over him. Maya had him in what was almost a hug, her arm crossing over his back. She was supporting most of his weight, though Caspian also hadn’t moved, still grasped his arm like he knew he was the only thing keeping him tethered here on earth. Suddenly it was so easy for Topsail to admit he didn’t want him to let go.

The universe heard this thought and turned it against him. Caspian’s grip intensified tenfold as shouted Octarian rang out across the clearing. **“What are you all conspiring about?”**

Every muscle in Topsail’s body contracted at once. It opened a gaping chasm in his chest, and the choking gasp that shredded his throat shook him to his core. He assumed basal form the fastest he ever had, his tentacles slipping from the agents’ hands. They let him escape, fall into a pile of himself in the dirt. He hated how he shivered.

 **“Commander.”** Eight’s tone was rigid. Their shadow passed across him, a brief eclipse, as they stepped over him to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other agents. The only barrier between him and…her. His ink veins had risen so close to the surface of his skin, he was afraid they’d rupture and he’d desiccate.

The silence hung, stifling, in the air. The ink that leached from Topsail’s thin basal-form skin coated him in a protective film against the sunlight, foaming where it touched the ground. He closed his eyes and waited, prepared for nothing.

And when she spoke, it was like she personally reached out and tore out his hearts from where they sat behind his eyes. **“What’s that look for? It almost makes me think you saw something you weren’t supposed to.”**

Topsail could practically absorb the tension from the atmosphere. It didn’t help his shakes. He heard the agents moving around, from the crunching of the soil beneath their shoes, but he couldn’t bear to open his eyes.

Eight’s voice trembled, just a little bit. **“Respectfully, Commander, you…you can’t keep secrets like this.”**

 **“Obviously.”** Branded on the inside of Topsail’s eyelids was the snarl she was surely wearing, lips curled, teeth bared. **“There are no secrets among Inklings.”**

**“This has nothing to do with Inklings! You knew this whole time—why didn’t you say anything?”**

**“What could I have said? The cutting project was a failure for a reason.”** The hostility, the _venom,_ that suddenly dripped from the Octoling elite’s words would have made Topsail melt into a puddle of ink like a child if he weren’t already there.

Eight wasn’t stupid, they must have picked up on the hard edge to Commander’s voice, but their own lost its initial weakness. **“You owe the truth to your s—your, uh…”**

**“I owe my cutting nothing.”**

Oh. That was how it was, then. That was fine. Topsail ignored the feeling of being sliced open, of his guts and viscera spilling out and soaking the dirt beneath him. It didn’t really work.

Eight, bless them, was still putting up a fight for his sake. **“But you—you just let him—why didn’t—”**

 ** _“She,”_** and even though that was far from the first time that pronoun had been weaponized against him he’d never, _ever_ get used to it, **“was not raised to know she was a cutting, or an experiment. The goal of the project was to raise soldiers genetically predisposed to excel at a particular form of combat. Telling them so may have influenced them to behave in ways they wouldn’t normally.”**

Topsail’s grip on the world was disintegrating, crumbling away in his claws the more he tried to hold it together. He ached with residual anger from today’s earlier chat with Red. But it didn’t last long, it couldn’t, not with this yawning pit that had opened within his core, swallowing him whole and leaving nothing.

 **“Your willful ignorance is inappropriate, Commander. He is a he, and you need to respect that.”** Eight’s indignance on his behalf warmed him for a moment before it, too, was chased away by a nagging thought— _why am I letting them fight my battles?_ He stopped shaking.

Commander didn’t reply, and Topsail felt the withering glare she was surely delivering Eight scorch his skin like it was aimed at him instead. Maybe it was. His stomach turned, but the numbed shock was fading from him, shifting to…something else, perched on the narrow border between anger and pain. An old friend, this nameless feeling, though one he hadn’t missed.

He stood up, his skin solidifying as he rose, stray droplets of ink rolling down his face. The dry grass crunched beneath his foot as he stepped forward, and Maya and Caspian whipped around in synch. Maya’s eyes widened and Caspian’s narrowed. Topsail realized too late he’d forgotten to blank his face. Whatever emotions he was feeling—he couldn’t even name them—were warping him, visibly, but he had no control.

Maya opened her mouth and he said, the word hitting like a bludgeon, “Don’t.” She snapped it shut. Caspian stepped silently out of his way.

He moved like a machine with joints rusted stiff. Eight froze when he approached, their mouth still hanging open from the words they hadn’t put their voice to. He stood beside them, within their arm’s reach, waiting for them to grab him and pull him away. But they didn’t move.

He turned to face the stranger.

The distance between them should have been a buffer, but Topsail could have been on the opposite side of the planet and still balk under her gaze. How was this _worse_ than yesterday, when he’d stood inches from her, challenged her…somehow totally missed that her eye masks were too much like his, thick on the undersides and sharply curving outward. Missed the jagged dark marks on the ends of her tentacles just like his, missed that they glowed green in the dark just like his. He was so _fucking_ stupid.

She surrendered, dropping her eyes to the ground. Topsail wouldn’t call the feeling that swept him pride, maybe more like its deranged cousin. The strength it lent him was superficial, feeding off itself, and his guts contorted in guilt. He clung to it anyway, it was all he had. **“Don’t look away from me.”**

She forced out a huff of sarcastic laughter. **“And who are you to be giving me orders?”**

He had an answer, but it caught in his throat. It was bad enough to have the words cross his mind; speaking them into existence was out of the question. He remembered why he’d taken a stand here in the first place, swallowed and willed his voice not to shake. **“I don’t care what you consider me in relation to you, or what you think of me at all. With one exception. I’m not your daughter.”**

She met him again, her eyes narrowed, her face like stone. **“I did not spend ten years living under the wreck you made of our home for you to turn a blind eye to the damage you did. Everyone knew it was** ** _my_ daughter who ran away. _My_ genetics killed the cutting project where it stood, _my_ flesh and blood induced the hypnogoggles initiative! I could not distance myself from those consequences—you don’t get to, either!”**

Topsail’s confusion snuffed out his anger—he’d never heard anything about “hypnogoggles,” it sounded like something from a video game. But the word made Eight visibly bristle, their hands clenching into tight fists. **“What—what does he have to do with the hypnogoggles?”**

 **“The subjects were irreplaceable.”** Commander leveled her scowl at Eight, but it still gave Topsail chills. **“The loss of even one was an incalculable waste of money and time. We could not afford for anyone else to desert—not another subject, not more soldiers. We took no chances, not even with the longest-standing elites. But you know that.”** She turned her glittering eyes back on Topsail, her mouth barely moving as she spoke. **“And now you know who to blame.”**

Eight also jerked their head in his direction and he cringed away. The shadow that crossed their face made his stomach churn. But then they turned back to Commander, matching her iciness. **“Yes. I know exactly whose fault it is. Octavio.”**

Commander’s lip curled. Three sharp, oversized teeth on the right side of her bottom jaw made Topsail run his tongue over his own similar cluster. **“It was a last resort. He wouldn’t have done it had he any other choice—”**

**“So you’ll make excuses for him, but not for me?”**

He hadn’t meant for that thought to come out of his mouth, but there it was, in existence, drawing the ire of his _donor._ Even Eight looked taken aback, if only for a moment. Then they turned back to Commander, indicating him with an open palm and a half-shrug, a _he’s got a point_ gesture.

 **“Enough.”** She squared her shoulders, her tentacles twitching. **“As if either of you would have the slightest idea what you’re talking about—one a traitorous amnesiac, one a failed experiment who hasn’t so much as seen the underground in a decade. If at any point you wish to stop eagerly swallowing Inkling lies, maybe then we can have an actual conversation.”** She stepped away.

Topsail was on the move before he even knew what he was doing, the distance between them now a meter at most. He recognized her dismissal, her trying to remove herself from the situation, just as he recognized her performative disdain. She was so wildly uncomfortable, so focused on keeping herself together, she had no remaining energy to exert on displaying emotion. It had been his entire life experience from age twelve to eighteen. And now her quick escape meant she was splintering. Her breaking point was close, and Topsail had to push her to it.

 **“You don’t get to turn your back on me again!”** he spat. **“How did you just—live your life, knowing that I existed but never doing anything to** —” What _did_ he want her to do?

She turned on her heel, her claws open. He saw the impact more than he felt it, his vision tilting sideways as he stumbled. The pain hit a fraction of a second later, the dull ache of the blow layered beneath the stinging of the fresh cuts on his left cheek.

He’d never been a fighter. He should have been angry, he even _wanted_ the same rage as when he’d dealt with Red to rip through his system and burn him away. But he was nothing more than an empty husk. He let the blood trickle down his face, couldn’t even muster the energy to lift a hand to it.

Either time slowed down around him or Commander froze, crushing her fingers against the metal plate on her chest. Her eyes were wide. Shock. Fear, even. The absence of anger, of contempt, was alien.

Then Eight shoved themself between them, corralling Commander away, out of his sight. Hands were on him, too, pulling him backward. He didn’t fight, he couldn’t have even if he wanted to. He felt himself land on the bench outside the cabin, the faces of both agents hovering in his field of vision. Neither spoke, too focused on the wound on his face. It pulsated with his hearts, but even the pain was distant, faint scraping at an invisible carapace glued to his skin.

“Are you okay?” He heard Maya’s voice more than he saw her, even though she was right in front of him. He regarded her like she was one of the rocky spires that dotted the horizon.

“I’ll get the kit.” Caspian was gone in an instant, into the cabin behind them. Topsail wished he could leave this all behind so easily.

He took the first move of his own volition, raising a hand to the scratches. The pads of his fingers came back smeared with cobalt blue, darker than his ink, than the coloration of his fingertips up to his second knuckle. This wasn’t real, none of it was. He pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth, the way he always forced himself awake from a nightmare. Nothing changed.

“Topsail…” Maya’s voice was soft. It was rare she didn’t shorten his name. He glanced in her direction even though the absolute last thing he wanted was to catch her eye. The thought of looking _anyone_ in the face right now made him want to retch. He burned at the pity in Maya’s eyes, a reflex against her sympathy, not because he was insulted by it but because he knew he didn’t deserve it.

Of course, voicing any of these thoughts meant finding the energy to actually use his voice, to move his mouth, and it was hard enough to sit up straight, to blink, to breathe. Maya didn’t find his silence encouraging, her eyes flicking away, toward the doorway where Caspian had disappeared. A silent plea for him to come back.

He needed to prove to her, and himself, that he was not actually catatonic. His lips moved and his voice came out in a hoarse, indistinct mumble. “Could’ve gone worse.”

She didn’t know what to make of that either, her mouth hanging open for a moment before she thought better of replying and closed it again.

Then Caspian returned, a beaten-up first-aid kit in his hands. It, too, was smudged with dried blood. Caspian ignored the biohazard it posed as he tossed it onto the bench beside Topsail. Maya winced.

“It’s not that bad,” Topsail found himself muttering. It wasn’t just a deflection, his injury felt more like a scrape from an urchin’s wayward spines than an aggravated assault. He’d certainly had worse.

“Can’t go through town with it still bleeding,” Caspian said flatly, holding a strip of gauze to the opening of an almost-empty bottle of antiseptic and shaking it upside down.

“We’re going back already?”

“You can’t stay here. Not with her.” Maya shook her head, her voice carrying an uncharacteristic severity.

“This’ll sting.” Caspian reached out and pressed the wet gauze to the scratches. He was right. Topsail grimaced at the flare of superficial pain, but something about it still felt muted, still felt sufficiently distant that he could ignore it if he wanted to.

Caspian’s hand was on his face.

The world snapped back to full color, surround-sound, bright and everywhere and _painfully_ real, and Topsail scrambled away, barely managing to clamp down on the scream in his throat. Maya caught him as he almost rolled off the bench, propped him back against the cabin wall. “You’re okay, dude. It’s okay.”

The ferocity with which his hearts pounded disagreed, but he couldn’t show it, doing everything he could to avoid Caspian’s eyes. The blue rushing to his face would do a lot to slow the bleeding, he was sure.

“Uh…here.” Caspian made to hand him the soaked gauze, and Topsail forced himself to take it, for no other reason than to seem normal. “Sorry. Forgot you’re, uh…not big on touch. Eight was the same way, for a while.”

Topsail did not want to think about Caspian’s hands on Eight. He mashed the gauze into the scrapes, welcomed the punishing sting of pain.

“We should go.” Maya cast a wary glance to the other side of the clearing. Topsail tried not to flinch at the thought of even making eye contact with Commander again.

Caspian grunted an affirmative, digging through the box again. “You mind if I slap these on you real quick?” he asked, holding wrapped bandages between his fingers like throwing stars.

“Go for it.” Topsail’s mask of flat nonchalance had affixed itself to his face again, though he wasn’t sure even that was enough to prevent him from flushing dark. He didn’t dare breathe as Caspian leaned in close, unpeeling the wrapping from the adhesive parts and sticking them to his face. Thankfully, or not, Caspian didn’t linger, putting a respectful amount of distance between them as soon as his work was done. He snapped the box closed. “We’re gone.”

If only. Topsail was no more than a ghost, chained to the realm of the living only by the dull panging of his cheek. The streets of Inkopolis passed him by in a smear of color, passersby bleeding into buildings bleeding into the sky. He didn’t dare take his eyes from the painting on the back of Caspian’s leather jacket, or Maya’s flouncing tentacles as she tried to match the stride of the much taller agent. His dependence on them turned his stomach. But he’d always been this way, hadn’t he? Scraping by only on the kindness, or pity, of others. A failure of an experiment from day one. No wonder his own mother wanted nothing to do with him.

Her eyes haunted him every time he closed his own.

-

“Commander.”

She acknowledges the tech’s greeting with a nod. He’s barely older than she is, judging by the youthful roundness of his face, and she pretends it doesn’t perturb her. Instead she wears her war face like the mask it is: flat and unmoving. Emotions are weakness, and she is never to show weakness, even when she feels as if her knees will give out from under her. She’s better than that, been trained better than that.

The tech knows what she’s here for, doesn’t need to ask. He turns away and she follows. The automatic door swishes closed behind her, cutting the bright light from the outside hall. Her eyes adjust immediately to the dimness of the lab. Just enough light here to be able to navigate, even without the glowing beacons of growing Octarians in test tubes scattered throughout this enormous chamber. Against her better judgement, she looks at them as she walks by. Masses of unmoving tentacles encased, suspended, in a viscous green substance. The foot soldiers. Clones of clones. Not quite sapient. She still can’t keep her eyes on them for too long, and her own weakness disgusts her.

The tech leads her through this labyrinth, weaving through these giant, bubbling tubes containing her future underlings. It’s not what she’s here for. They both come to a stop at the opposite end of the room, before a door and a machine. The tech leans forward. Swipes the badge hanging from a cord around his neck, punches in a numeric code on the keypad, reaches up to one of the tentacles on his head and squeezes. For his trouble, a thin film of yellow ink coats his palm and fingers. He shakes a droplet off his index finger and it lands in a petri dish, which he pops into the machine. It hums thoughtfully before flashing green. Confirmed.

This is why she doesn’t come here often. It’s a waste of time and resources for her to be checking in every day, or every other day, or even every week. The tech has better things to be doing than escorting her to see…this. It’s just inefficient.

The tech wipes his hand off with a cloth he pulled from the inside of his labcoat. The doors click and slide open, and he catches her eye. Waiting for a dismissal. As much as she’d like to wave him off to get back to his actual job, she’s not done with him yet. She doesn’t quite remember where she’s supposed to be, and has no desire to explore this room alone. She tilts her head into the open doorway. He doesn’t react, bless him, and strides inside first.

This room is smaller than the first, in both floorspace and because it has a lower ceiling. Giant glass containment tubes span from the floor to the ceiling, filled with the same green goo. Except if she looks hard enough at it, she sees swirls of color, reds and blues, and they shimmer as they circulate throughout the tube. Inside each one is a developing Octoling. They are finally beginning to resemble what they are, not the featureless blobs she saw the last time she paid this chamber a visit. There are machines hooked up to each individual, wires and tubes of varying thicknesses stretching from the tops and bottoms of their glass confines, and she is reminded of an insect trapped in a spider’s web.

The tech takes her to the leftmost wall, past three tubes, and comes to a stop in front of one just the same. She can barely bring herself to look, but she does.

Her throat seizes up, so she forces herself to speak through it. “How old?” As if she doesn’t already know.

“Six months,” the tech says. He chooses not to comment on her alleged forgetfulness. Maybe he knows she knows, maybe not. It’s not his place to ask.

She’s silent for long enough that the tech excuses himself, mumbling something along the lines of giving her some privacy. She doesn’t acknowledge him this time, just watches out of her peripheral as he sinks away into the surrounding darkness, and listens as the door slides closed. She shuts her eyes, breathes deeply, and opens them to look straight at her daughter, floating in a pod of slime.

It’s undeniable. The fetal Octoling has her ink color. The exact same shade of dark blue, like the night sky, like the depths of the ocean. It was what was expected; all Octolings born from a cutting were guaranteed to inherit their donor’s sex and ink signature, so they said. But to see it reflected back at her from the confines of a glass tube…

Coming here was a mistake, she thinks as a sick feeling wells up inside her. The tentacle she’d sacrificed for this purpose six months ago had grown back just fine within one, but the pain that she thought she buried within her memory returns fresh every time she looks at this Octoling who shares her genetics. Seeing it reminds her that she has brought a life into this world. Even if all she did was donate a tentacle, at the behest of her peers, to add to their army. Even if she would never have a hand in how this person—this _person_ —would grow up. She doesn’t _want_ to parent it, she never has, so shouldn’t it be a comfort that she won’t?

It’s not. This child is literally a part of her, and she has relinquished her control of it.

The first time she’d come here was the day after it happened. The remains of her donor tentacle had still dribbled blue ink down her face, and she’d kept the stump wrapped up in gauze. It was still just a tentacle then, floating in a different concoction of liquid, one more transparent and watery. She visited again a few months ago, and her tentacle had transformed into a jellyfish-like misshapen sphere of nerve clusters, its pulsations encased in a cloudy sac of membranous tissue. It hadn’t been real. Not until now.

A twisted thought occurs to her, one that nearly takes her breath away, and she scans the control console before she truly knows what she’s doing. A moment later her rationality returns: as if there were one single switch she could flip, one plug she could pull, that would end it all. Aside from the king’s quarters, this is the most precious room in the base. The lives of these Octolings, each a cutting from the army’s most elite, are irreplaceable. Their life support’s backup has backup. They will not so easily be destroyed, not by accident, not by sabotage.

She steps back, regaining a hold on herself. Her daughter’s tentacles flex for a moment, the motion catching her eye. She reminds herself to breathe just as the still-developing tentacles float back into their resting position. Short and stubby, suckerless, but mobile. That’s probably a good sign. Really, the growing Octoling just looks like an oddly bulbous basal-form octopus at first glance. It’s only upon closer examination that she can see that its skin is translucent, the chromatophores not yet fully developed, and ink flows through the superficial veins like rivers cutting through landmass. There are swollen lumps where its eyes will eventually be, the lenses unfinished but formed enough to resemble black beads. They reflect no light. It’s hard to see the other organs through the dense web of ink-veins that concentrate especially in the head region, behind the eyes.

She feels as if she should do more, but what? Approach it? Put her hand on the glass as if it could feel her touch? Speak to it, as if it had even the organs to hear her voice, much less understand? She will not waste her actions or her words on something that is only clinically alive. The thought is cold, but for the first time in her life, her own frigidity digs its claws into her, erodes at her careful detachment.

She has never been so weak, and it is because of this she cannot return.

 _It’s not your fault,_ she almost wants to say to her daughter, isolated behind these glass walls, but her tongue kills the words and buries them in her throat. She shuts her eyes instead. She should have never done this.

The tech meets her at the front of the first room, with the developing Octarians. Only a few of them have grown eyes, and they’re closed, but her skin crawls as if they are all watching her. “Commander?” he prompts.

“I will not be coming here again.” Her tone is level and matter-of-fact, just as she’s trained. What she hadn’t trained for, what catches her by surprise and then floods her with revulsion, is how her gut twists on itself at her own words. The tech nods, his face just as blank.

“But…” The word slips out. She purses her lips too late. The tech looks at her, one eyebrow ever so slightly raised.

Well, she’s made her bed. “I would like…occasional status updates. Nothing too detailed. Just…” She falters. It’s not like her to leave a sentence unfinished, and she hates it. The tech is lucky she isn’t armed, she has half a mind to splat him merely for the crime of being a witness.

“Affirmative, Commander.” The tech dips his head. “You aren’t the only donor to request such a thing.”

His presumption that she’s insecure about her decision and needs reassuring oversteps innumerous bounds…even if he’s right. Regardless, she lets it go. She nods to him on her way out, leaving the dark room behind and stepping out into the light of the world she knows.

The messages she receives over the years are brief, just as she asked. They ask her if she would like to name the child (the _child_ ), and she declines. Shortly after they relay the name the scientists chose for her daughter upon ejection. She doesn’t love it.

The notes come. She is one year old, and very healthy. She is four years old, and beginning to walk on two feet. She is ten years old, and able to hold a gun specially made for those who have not yet taken proper upright form. She is twelve years old.

The messages stop. She never receives another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact that present-tense scene at the end was one of the first scenes i wrote. it predates the entire plot of this story, even. this fic went through A Lot of changes re: characters and basic plot since i first decided i wanted to write it but i was, and still am, so proud of that scene i needed to incorporate it somehow, and here it is, at last.
> 
> also i drew this a month ago in anticipation of posting this chapter. i Really Like this chapter have i mentioned that. check out my squid twitter (squitter) while you're at it: [here](https://twitter.com/plectronoceras/status/1299809295903731713)


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi i'm not "back" i just feel bad for not updating in 2 full months and also i have a tradition of always uploading a thing on halloween, my favorite holiday
> 
> work is letting up juuuust a little bit and frankly i'm anticipating getting shut down completely again very soon. i've made progress on the Ending ending but it's not done yet and once it is i still have to attach it to what's already there which is much harder than it sounds. so still expect this agonizingly slow update schedule probably until i finish this 100%. see y'all in another two months

At some point in the past hour, Topsail had died, and his consciousness now inhabited his own corpse.

It was hard to think of himself as anything else. His body was unresponsive; he hadn’t moved from when he’d first dropped onto Caspian’s couch, hours or months or eons ago. His eyes had unfocused and he couldn’t bring them back together. His head was full of nothing, half-formed thoughts chasing each other in endless circles, none of them useful, none of them pleasant. From lightyears away, he thought he heard Maya and Caspian whispering, no doubt about him, but he couldn’t tune into their words.

Eventually Maya seated herself beside him—not really, she was on the opposite end of the couch and was clearly taking a lot of care to maintain that distance between them, but the intention was clear. It was a nice gesture, maybe. He couldn’t really tell, not through this fog. The only thing holding him together was an impending headache.

Maya didn’t try to engage him in conversation. Was that odd for her? He thought it was. He knew she was looking at him, though, evaluating him through sight alone. It was almost enough to make him feel uncomfortable, but what was he going to do about it, ask her to stop? He stared straight ahead as his tentacles tensed, curling tighter against his forehead.

“Hey, Four. ‘M off to take our weapons to Sheldon like we talked about.” Caspian spoke from a ways behind Topsail, now, on his way to the front door.

Maya shot him a confused look over the back of the couch. “You’re okay with leaving us alone in your apartment?”

“You’ve been sleeping in my bed. Think it’s a little late to start setting ‘healthy boundaries,’ whatever those are.” His words were…light, in a way Topsail hadn’t heard from him before. His hearts skipped a beat. “Besides, if you go snooping through my shit and you see something you don’t wanna see, that’s on y’all.” A pause. “That said, there’s one rule. Don’t touch my bass. I’ll be back in…uh, whenever Sheldon feels like shutting up, I guess.”

Maya sucked in air through her teeth. “You’re giving him that much leeway? Your funeral. See you next week.”

If Caspian laughed in response, it was very quiet. The next thing Topsail heard was the shutting of the front door.

“Bass?” he mumbled, his own voice so quiet, so paper-thin that he could barely hear it himself.

Maya’s surprise was evident even if she was just on the edges of his peripheral vision. But she recovered. “Uh, yeah! He plays in a band, I think. I’ve never, like, asked him for all the details, but Mar—the other agents say it means more to him than anything.”

Topsail remembered all the short-lived but intense celebrity crushes he’d had on various musicians when he was in middle school and wanted to drop his face in his hands. Maybe it was time to admit he had a type. And that his tastes in men hadn’t changed since he was thirteen. He fought back a groan.

“But speaking of our Agent Three!” Maya leaned closer into his field of vision. Her usual mischief sparkled in her eyes. Topsail turned his head, imagined it creaking like bending metal. The skeptical frown he always wore in response to this _look_ crossed his face without him even having to try, it was so ingrained in him. Even that tiny normalcy was almost comforting.

“What about him?” he ground out.

His playing dumb, of course, did not deter Maya in the slightest. She raised her eyebrows. “You got it bad.”

“I do not.” Well, his face heating up meant he was still alive after all.

“I didn’t think you’d be interested in someone like him! But I guess the whole _tall, dark and handsome bad boy_ thing has its own appeal, especially to a nerd like you—"

 _“Maya.”_ Maybe he’d get lucky and he’d have a heart attack and die right here on Caspian’s floor.

“Sorry, sorry.” She held her hands up, as if she’d been able to tell Topsail was a second away from smacking her with a throw pillow. “For real, I think it’s cute. He’s a good guy. You could do way worse than falling for _Agent fucking Three,_ that’s for sure.”

 _That’s the worst part. He’s Agent fucking Three, and I’m…_ He leaned forward, pushing his glasses up his forehead to mash the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he mumbled.

The spark of energy faded from Maya’s features. “…Yeah. Sorry. I just don’t…really know what to say about all of this. If you want a distraction, I can provide, or if you just want to process, I’ll shut up.”

Oh, right, “all of this.” He was still tempted to throw himself out of the nearest window rather than think about it.

He felt more present now, though, felt just a little more like a person and less like a zombie. Air was entering and leaving his lungs, and his brain was picking out little details about the environment around him, like normal. The sun poured in through the cracks of the blinds over the windows and the balcony door. Last night’s nest of pillows and blankets still lay piled in the corner of the room. He rolled his shoulders and winced when something popped.

What _did_ he want?

“What is there to talk about?” he muttered, the words leaking out of him the same way his blood had dribbled down his cheek.

“I…don’t know. That’s up to you.” Maya gave a quiet sigh, leaning further back into the couch and turning her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t want to push you to do anything you don’t want to, but…when something like this happened to me, I isolated myself, and that was, like, the worst thing I could’ve possibly done to myself. Obviously you and I are _super_ different people, but I don’t…you know, want to let you withdraw if it’s not gonna help.”

He hung on her words. For all her extroversion and her people skills, Maya so rarely talked about herself, her personal life. Even after being friends and coworkers for over a year, Topsail barely knew anything about her besides the basics, and what was relevant for their jobs. And now she was alluding to… “Something like _this_ happened to you?”

“We’re talking about _you,_ dude.” The stoniness with which she shut him down took him aback a little, and he must have shown it, as she averted her eyes, relenting. “Okay, I, uh…it’s not at all a fair comparison, actually. I meant it more in terms of…major life-changing events, I guess? What actually happened was…literally the opposite of what’s going on here.” She swatted one of her longer tentacles out of her face with an uncharacteristic annoyed snappiness. Topsail was about to tell her to forget it when she let out another sigh. “You gained a mom. I lost mine.”

His gut clenched at the use of that word, but he let it slide. The appropriate thing to do under these circumstances was apologize, right?

She beat him to it, lifting a hand. “Don’t need your condolences. It was years ago. And again, this is about you, not me. I guess I’m just trying to say that…” She trailed off, and her tongue appeared between her lips, proving she was concentrating. Topsail could relate to the sheer struggle it was to choose words. “Whatever you might need from me, from us, we’ll do everything we can to help. But the caveat is that we’re not gonna leave you alone. I sure won’t, anyway.”

Topsail hoped the attempt to crack a smile would be enough, he wasn’t entirely sure what shape his lips twisted in, but Maya at least didn’t react with unease. “That’s fair. I’m…sick of being alone with my thoughts.”

“Talk to me.” Maya leaned in, life returning to her face.

He released a sigh of his own, dropping his eyes to the floor beneath his feet. His brain was a mess of tangled string, but maybe if he pulled at one single thought enough, he could unknot it from the rest, lay it out separately, and then…he didn’t know, but it had to be an improvement, right? And right now there was one thought that stood out even among the thrashing masses of the rest.

He brushed his fingers against the plastic stuck over his wounds, rewarded with a tiny flicker of superficial pain when he pressed the absorbent pad into his skin. “She looked terrified.”

The furrowing of Maya’s brow conveyed her confusion well enough that she didn’t need to vocalize.

“I mean, don’t take this to mean I’m defending her. I’m not. I don’t…I don’t know…” There were too many thoughts swirling around in his head, too many incongruent emotions boiling inside him—it was crushing. His tentacles quivered, curling around themselves in agitation. The movement caught Maya’s eye, made her wince, so he deliberately relaxed himself, resisting the urge to dig his claws into his knees. “But I legitimately don’t think she meant to do…this.” He waved a hand in the vague direction of the scratches on his cheek.

The skepticism that further narrowed Maya’s eyes was not surprising. Her tone was nevertheless even as she asked, “What makes you say that?”

As if he had the words to explain. His gaze drifted across the room, taking nothing in, as his brain spun in its tracks. Finally, just to break the expectant silence, he forced out, “I just…I see myself in her. Which, you know… _duh._ Somehow, I was the last person to see it.”

Maya shook her head. “Eight didn’t catch on until…and I doubt Three did, either.”

She was excluding someone important. Topsail turned to face her, trying to quirk an eyebrow even though he imagined it just looked more like a flat glare. “What about you?”

She pulled an awkward grimace, avoided his eyes with what he was almost tempted to call meekness. “I, uh…yeah, honestly, I had my suspicions from the very start. But, like, what was I gonna do? Call you up, hey T, I found this lady in the underground and I’m pretty sure you and her are related ‘cause you’re both light-skinned Octolings with blue ink? Felt just a little presumptuous!”

“Okay, fair enough.” The smile that grew on Topsail’s face was much easier to maintain all of a sudden, even if it died within seconds. “Anyway…I’ll just leave it at, it’s easy for me to tell I share fifty-ish percent of my genetics with her.” Was that even the case? Who, or what, provided the other fifty percent? Or was he just a straight-up _clone?_ Chills raced down his arms and he shelved those thoughts in the darkest corner of his brain, where maybe he’d forget about it (he wouldn’t and he knew it). His stomach turned, so he focused on Maya at all costs. “And you know me. I wouldn’t…resort to violence like that, not on impulse.” Unless Red was involved, but she didn’t need to know that. “And wouldn’t it seem…unbecoming, I guess, of an Octarian elite to snap like that? I get the impression that that’s all that matters to her…”

Maya stuck out her tongue again. “Well…from what the others have said about the goo, the…what did Eight call it once? ‘Sanitization?’ Wouldn’t surprise me if that had something to do with it.”

Topsail nodded, the horror in Commander’s eyes again burned into the back of his own. But like a proper scientist, he had his doubts. “But the thing is…when she kicked all of you out of the cabin to speak to me one-on-one, she told me it doesn’t control her as much as we think it does. Up until now, she hasn’t really done anything like that under its influence.”

“You sure about that?” Maya pointedly tapped a finger on her left bicep. “I don’t blame you for forgetting, but she very much did shoot me a couple days ago.”

She could have sounded…angrier about it, but Topsail knew that she only showed what she wanted others to see. He wouldn’t blame her for being livid, no matter how quietly, and that made him reluctant to speak again. “Yeah, about that…she, uh…implied it was intentional?”

That same dark look crossed over Maya’s face, and he scrambled to put his thoughts together. “I—I don’t know what happened down there, no one ever told me, but she’s convinced what she did saved your life somehow. I don’t think she _wanted_ to hurt you, either—the whole reason she wanted to go back in the domes was because she thought she could patch you up better than we did. And she succeeded, didn’t she?”

Maya’s glare lessened more and more as he spoke, the frown now more a result of concentration than anger. “You might have a point,” she muttered at last, scratching her head. “Doesn’t mean I want to be around her when she’s waving that e-liter around, though.”

“I don’t, either.” Topsail allowed himself another temporary smile. “Anyway, I’m just…speculating, based solely off me and what I’d do. I…do know from experience that I’m not…nice when someone pushes me to my breaking point. And I went out of my way to find hers. I’m not surprised it ended up like this.” He rubbed his cheek again, thinking he was getting used to the residual pain. “You didn’t see her face after it happened. She looked afraid. I don’t know if it was because she was afraid of retaliation, or…if it was actual regret.”

Maya was quiet for a long time, and Topsail was thankful for the silence that let him regain his footing. His thoughts still swarmed, still buzzed like flies, but maybe they weren’t so loud anymore.

“What do you think you’ll do?”

He wished he could blame the resulting silence on being caught off-guard by the question, but he’d been asking himself that very same thing nonstop since leaving the canyon. “I don’t know. But…in the short-term, our fight’s against the sanitization. And in that sense, she’s an ally.”

“A very loose sense.” Maya shook her head. “I don’t think I can trust her entirely…and I especially don’t think the two of you should be in the same room together.”

He shrugged. “I want to talk to her, actually. I…I need answers. I need…accountability.”

The way her eyes narrowed said _good luck with that,_ but a moment later she erased it all with a smile. “Well, when you need backup, you know who to call.”

“Thanks.” The word was deadpan, but he meant it. She nodded, eyes turned downward, fishing her phone out of her pocket and curling up on her side of the couch. Her ears flicked as she swiped away some notifications. The motion caught his eye.

“Is it my turn to ask an invasive question?” He needed something to think about that wasn’t himself, or Commander, or, god forbid, _Caspian…_ plus he’d always been curious about that missing tip of her ear.

She pursed her lips as she glanced back up at him. “I guess it’s only fair,” she muttered.

“What happened to your ear?”

“Oh, this?” Her apprehension melted away as she sat up, her left ear flicking again. “Steel eel.”

Grizzco terminology. Topsail had never participated in that shady business—he would have been eaten alive, maybe literally—but it was a favored way of earning extra money among undergrads at U of I, and he’d osmosed a lot of information about it just by listening to his peers. He’d believe that one of those things, long metal machines with enormous, jagged teeth that steamrolled anything in their path, would shred an Inkling like paper. But it was the glib, rehearsed way Maya had answered that made him say, “Really?”

“No.” Maya seemed to avoid his eyes, keeping hers squarely on her phone. “The Octoshower. I forgot that Sting Rays go through walls, and…it clipped me. All things considered, I got off pretty easy. Four inches to the left and it would’ve blasted a hole through my face.”

Topsail winced. The casualness with which she spoke, and the implied certainty that an Octarian-manned war machine was responsible for this permanent damage to his best friend, and her words brought to his mind someone who _did_ have a hole in his face…

“I don’t mind it, honestly. You can go out on the street right now and see at least two Inklings with notches or whatever in their ears, and for much stupider reasons. I don’t stick out because of it. But, man, the way Marie acted when it happened, you’d think I got decapitated or someth—”

She clapped a hand over her mouth, and groaned into it, “Oh, fuck, I did _not_ just say that.”

The name drop did not escape Topsail’s notice. He tilted his head. “Who’s Marie?”

“No one. I mean, my…mentor?” Maya dragged her hand up her face to rest on her forehead. “You’re not gonna let me lie to you. She’s Agent Two. I have always been so goddamn _bad_ with this codename shit.”

Topsail was still processing. “You don’t mean…Marie, from, like, the Squid Sisters, do you?” It was possibly the stupidest question he could have asked, _of course_ she’d be talking about a world-famous celebrity and not a perfectly normal person who just so happened to share a name with…

“The very same.”

Oh.

“Don’t freak out on me, dude.” Maya shot him a grin, like she was joking, but there was a nervousness to it that suggested she wasn’t entirely kidding. “Yeah, they popularized the Inkantation and all, but the way a lot of Octolings practically worship them weirds them out…”

“The what?” Topsail tilted his head the opposite way now, letting his brows come together. “You mean that one song? I mean, it’s not _bad,_ but it’s also not worth…worshipping anyone over?”

Maya stared at him for long enough that his skin crawled. “I don’t think we’re on the same page. You’re telling me it’s not a huge deal to all topside Octarians?”

“Not to me. You know I prefer Off the Hook. As far as pop goes, that is.” And while he wouldn’t speak for the rest of his topside-Octoling friends, he figured Red would only ever willingly listen to the Squid Sisters if tied down and/or held at gunpoint. “Why do you think it’s such a _thing_ for us?” He would have almost been insulted at the stereotyping if he weren’t so completely perplexed.

Maya kept staring at him for a few more moments, before she let out her breath in a huff and steepled her fingers. “The Calamari Inkantation was the catalyst that made a lot of dome-bound Octolings fight off their brainwashing and seek the surface. I thought…there was something…I really don’t want to call it magic, that’s so unscientific, but…you know what I mean, right? That song _did_ things to people. And no one’s been able to explain why or how.”

 _Music,_ Red hissed in Topsail’s memory. The bottom dropped out of his stomach.

He found himself standing. “I need to talk to Eight.”

“What, right now?” Maya rose to her feet as well, her arms crossed.

“They’ll know the most about the goo. They and Caspian, I guess, but he’s—”

“Whoa, hold up, how do you know his name?” Maya brought the tips of her fingers up to her mouth to tap them anxiously against her lips.

“Wasn’t you. He told me, last night.” The feeling that rose up within his stomach with this admission was _not_ butterflies because he was _not_ a fucking _schoolgirl._

“Seriously?” Maya dropped her hand. “Dude, he only told _me_ ‘cause we all thought I was quitting the NSS permanently. He doesn’t like anyone using it as long as agent business is happening. How did you…?”

Topsail gave as much of a nonchalant shrug as he could as heat rushed to his cheeks, knowing Maya would notice anyway but refusing to acknowledge it. “You should’ve bought him dinner first.”

Maya’s cackling laughter filled the room in a way he had to admit to himself he’d missed. “Damn, T, who knew you had so much game? Save some for the rest of us!”

“Oh, shut up.” All three of Topsail’s hearts were working overtime now, sending every drop of blood to his face. He shook his head, as if that would return it to its rightful place in the rest of his body. “Look, I don’t want to promise anything yet, which is why I want to talk to someone who might have more of a clue first, but…I might have an idea. About how to fix this whole mess.”

Maya raised her eyebrows. “I’d come with, but…I don’t want to leave Three—sorry, Caspian’s apartment empty and unlocked. And obviously he took his keys with him to Sheldon’s.”

Topsail shrugged. “I can find the canyon myself.” He hoped.

“Be careful. An Octoling in a lab coat ducking into and out of every alley in Inkopolis Square might look a little…you know.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, not completely believing it. “Besides, I’ve got a friend who literally just offered to bail me out of jail if I need it, so…”

“You _what?”_

“I’ll keep you updated!” He rounded the couch, life returning to his being at the promise of answers. Of something _useful_ coming out of his actions, for once. He jogged down the stairs outside Caspian’s apartment, the sunlight on his skin infusing him with determination. A weird feeling, that, but one he thought he could get used to. Out here, in the fresh air of the surface, the looming threat of the sanitization felt more like a nightmare, the memory evaporating in the sun.

If he could have even a small hand in making that a reality, that was all he could ask for.

-

It took every ounce of Caspian’s willpower to not hurl his headset over the edge of the cliff and watch it smash to bits on the rocks below. The damn thing was malfunctioning and it was driving him crazy. He’d destroyed the third Great Octoweapon, but during that fight he kept hearing garbled noises over the radio channel, almost like speech but not quite. Cuttlefish had gone silent, which wasn’t normal. And he hadn’t been waiting outside the boss kettle for Caspian’s victorious return. _He’s just at the shack,_ Caspian told himself, the mechanical platforms of Octo Valley passing underneath his feet in a blur. _He’s at the shack, just like usual. He’ll fix my headset, and everything will be fine._

The wood-and-metal structure loomed into view at last. “Cap!” Caspian bellowed over the frantic pounding of his hearts. “Cap, my headset’s busted, something happened during that last fight and…”

He slowed when he passed the first kettle. There was no familiar figure outside the shack, hunched over his bamboo cane. He was inside, Caspian decided, but he already knew the truth even before he rounded the shack’s perimeter, peering into the tiny window at the back. Empty. Cuttlefish was gone. Caspian was alone in Octo Valley.

He lingered around the shack for a few minutes more, hoping against hope that the captain would materialize out of nowhere, knowing it was useless. He was numb. There were still Zapfish to retrieve, there were still Octarians to fight, Cuttlefish being gone didn’t change any of that. But the thought of lowering himself back into enemy territory, alone, made his blood run cold. His vast experience of defeating three Octoweapons and countless Octarians did nothing to lessen the chill that consumed him, eroded his courage.

The grate to Inkopolis rattled, and Caspian’s nerves had him aiming his hero shot before he even registered what he was doing. Two blobs of ink burst through, solidifying into their upright forms, one pink, one green. Caspian’s finger grazed the trigger of his weapon before he finally recognized they were probably not Octarians, and he lowered the barrel an inch or two. These newcomers looked… _achingly_ familiar.

The pink one was the first to notice him, or maybe just to react. Besides her bubblegum-pink clothes, she was wearing the darkest pair of shades he’d ever seen, covering up the entire top half of her face. The long black tentacles that reached almost down to her ankles, however, were pretty distinct. “Uh, afternoon, Agent Three!” she said, offering him a movie-star-quality smile. “You maybe wanna not hold us at gunpoint?”

He did what she asked, bringing his shooter to resting position, but he still scrutinized them as they approached. The green one was sizing him up just the same, the lower half of her face covered by a cloth mask. Her tentacles were white, but mostly hidden underneath a wide-billed hat, the same shade of green.

“I’m sure you’ve already guessed,” she said through her mask, her voice much more subdued and deadpan. “But we’re Agents One,” she pointed to the other, “and Two. Heard a lot about you through Cap’n Cuttlefish.”

Well, this was a hell of a first impression to make. Caspian still had flecks of purple ink from the Octowhirl streaked across his hero gear, not yet dissolved completely, and…

“Cap’s gone,” he said, his voice much hoarser than he’d expected.

“We know.” Now Agent One matched her fellow agents’ grimness. “Got his distress signal. We’ve traced his location all the way into the heart of the valley…where we’re pretty sure the Octarian leader is.”

“You’re kidding.” The pieces finally began to fall together. “They—they took him? Why?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Agent Two strode forward, her eyes locked on him. Caspian had thought until now that he wasn’t the type to balk at confrontation, but something about the other agent, his predecessor, was intimidating in a way he wasn’t prepared for. He was _Agent Three_ , for the seas’ sake, he’d been spending almost every afternoon for a month risking bodily harm to fight off Octarians, and here he was, cowering at her feet. _Get a grip, man._

She stopped just before she invaded his personal space. Somehow, despite him being a couple inches taller, she looked down her nose at him, her eyes narrowed.

“How old are you?” she said at last.

That…was not the first question he’d expected her to ask. Caspian gaped at her for a moment before remembering himself. “I’m sixteen…almost.”

He’d mumbled the last word, but it did not escape her ears. She brought a hand up to her face to pinch the bridge of her nose.

One approached them both now, and Two shot her a look out of the corner of her eye. “He’s _fifteen._ Cap’n recruited a high school sophomore.”

“Hey!” Caspian bristled, the overwhelming presence of the senior agents forgotten. “School’s ending in a couple months, and then I’ll technically be a junior, so—"

“Ease up a little, Two. We weren’t much older than that when we started.” One knocked her shoulder against Two’s; the latter’s eyes narrowed, but she stepped back, and Caspian breathed again.

“Fine. I do have to admit you’ve done good work so far. But it’s not over yet.” She looked past Caspian’s shoulder, out into the metal jungle that was the rest of Octo Valley. Caspian tightened his grip on the hero shot.

“But we’ll help you out!” One chimed in, giving him another blinding grin. “If Gramps could guide you without getting you killed, how hard could it be?”

“Way to inspire confidence,” Two said with a sigh, but the corners of her eyes crinkled as if she were smiling behind her mask. “Seriously, though, we’ve got your back. Just keep your head on straight.”

“Also we’re cutting you off for today!” One interjected, seeing how Caspian straightened up and squared his shoulders. “We know you’re worried about Gramps and all, we are too—”

“I’m not _worried,”_ Caspian lied through his teeth. “It’s just…man, going after an old guy like that’s a scummy move.”

Two raised an eyebrow. “What little intel we have suggests that hurting him is not their goal. I think they did it to send a message, or disarm you. Maybe both.”

“Why should I give a shit why they did it?” Caspian scoffed, smacking the underside of the hero shot into his palm. “Cap’s gone, alone in enemy territory. That’s all that matters to me.”

“Their motivations should mean something to you, Three. Maybe they did it in the hopes that you’d get angry and overexert yourself trying to get him back.”

One was nodding so vigorously her sunglasses threatened to fall off. “Besides, you literally just destroyed an entire Octoweapon, like, ten minutes ago. You gotta give yourself a break. Tired squids make stupid decisions.”

“We can’t afford to have you disappear on us too,” Two agreed. If Caspian didn’t know any better, he might have thought she sounded legitimately concerned.

He couldn’t deny the growing achiness in his arms and legs as the adrenaline finally ebbed away. His feet hurt from being squeezed into these stupid hero runners, and he could practically hear his mother’s voice in his head, nagging him about the biology homework he’d put off for as long as possible. Still, he protested. “I can’t just…knowingly leave this alone. Go on with my day like it’s not happening.”

One’s lips twisted into a sympathetic pout, and even Two’s eyes softened. “Trust me, Three, we get it. But you can’t be Agent Three all the time. I’ll reiterate, we don’t have any reason to think they’ll hurt the captain. And even if they did, you’d be surprised how well he can fend for himself.”

“We’ll hold down the fort while you’re out there being…not-Agent-Three,” One said, a sliver of her cheeriness shining through again. “And when you’re ready to come back, we’ll be here to help. You’re not allowed to skip school, either!” she added in a rush.

Caspian allowed himself to roll his eyes and mutter, “What’re you, my mom?” as he caved and retreated into the little cabin.

When he’d changed out of his hero gear and back into his street clothes, he found the senior agents almost exactly where he left them, murmuring to each other in voices that did not carry. They cut their conversation as soon as he stepped out of the cabin, and One waved to him. “Get some rest, Three, you’ve earned it.”

The fact that neither of them were so concerned with the situation as he was made him wonder if it had happened before. How were they so convinced that Cuttlefish was in minimal danger? His thoughts swirled as he walked, and from this resulting hurricane something finally clicked.

“Hey,” he called across the clearing, and they both turned back over their shoulders. “Has anyone ever told you guys you look like the Squid Sisters?”

“No, Three. You are the only person in Inkopolis to ever make that observation.” Two gave him a withering glare.

“Yeah, we get that all the time,” One laughed, waving her hand dismissively. “But I take it as a compliment—I mean, the Squid Sisters are only the freshest of the fresh! Who wouldn’t wanna be compared to them?”

Caspian tried not to smile. “It’s definitely a compliment. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As he slipped through the grate, back into Inkopolis Plaza, Callie turned back to Marie with her grin mutating into more of a grimace. “Aw, crap, he totally knows. What do you think gave it away?”

“No idea,” Marie lied, doing everything in her power to not eyeball her cousin’s largely unaltered hairstyle. “But I think he’ll keep his mouth shut. If he outs us, he’d have to out himself, too. Besides, if his street clothes are anything to go by, I don’t think anyone he hangs out with would be impressed if he tried to brag about knowing the Squid Sisters personally.”

Callie giggled. “Yeah, I think we’d be in trouble if one of us was…oh, you know that new-ish metal band with the vocalist who’s this itty-bitty Inkling girl? Seems more his style.”

“Focus, Cal.” Marie lifted her eyes to the clear sky of Octo Valley, finding no comfort in the cool breeze that kissed her skin. “Gramps can’t hold on forever. We have a job to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i Told you canon characters show up eventually, albeit only for flashback scenes like this, but it counts right? tbh i don't care very much for the "idols," they're probably the least interesting thing about splatoon lore and yet it's all canon focuses on lmao. but for those of you who do like them there's the bone i'm throwing you. not the last time they'll show up either but again only in flashbacks, sorry. 
> 
> i've been drawing a lot in the meantime and i post all my squid-related art (and other fic-related material) on [this twitter](https://twitter.com/plectronoceras) so check that out


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> only posting this now cause i had a stressful week and wanted to show something that i worked hard on and that people might appreciate lol
> 
> still chipping away at the remaining gaps in the story, made some good progress, not returning to "The Schedule" yet. my goal is to have it all finally done before i have a major surgery sometime early next year (i Assure you you'll be hearing more about that when i actually know when it'll be happening, it's a Huge deal to me), but even if not i'll have nothing but time to work on it after. uhh enjoy what is probably the last coc upd8 of this hell year.

The grate shuddered and clanked as Topsail’s basal form ripped through it. He reformed solid and landed evenly, not even stumbling. He turned his sights to the cabin, anticipation gnawing at his gut. Eight was probably the most well-informed one of them all. If they didn’t have any answers for him, no one would.

Before he could so much as step forward, the cabin barked Octarian at him. “What are you doing here?”

Oh. Right. _That._ Topsail didn’t want to say he’d _forgotten_ about Commander, but all his issues with the former elite had taken a backseat to his drive for answers. He froze as she glared at him from the bench outside the cabin’s front door. She’d taken down the strands of seaweed from her tentacles, instead wrapping them around her wrists. Her charger leaned against the wall beside her, but it at least wasn’t in her hands, or aimed at him. He’d forgotten about the cuts on his cheek until now. They sent tiny twinges of pain through his skin, a not particularly friendly reminder.

“I’m going to talk to Eight.” Approaching her was the last thing he wanted to do, but he needed to get past her to the door.

“You will do no such thing.” She stood. He hated how his first instinct was to shrink back despite the distance still between them. “They’re asleep. This has been their only downtime in more than a full day. Unless you’re dying, you can wait until they’re awake.”

“This is about the—” He waved a hand at her shoulder—the goo glittered in the sunlight—and she bared her teeth.

“I am fine. I can wait. So can you.”

He considered arguing, or ignoring her entirely and walking in anyway, but the cuts on his face warned him otherwise…plus, if this really was Eight’s only chance to rest, he’d feel bad cutting it short to interrogate them. Still, a question was burning a hole through his tongue. “Why do you suddenly give a shit about their well-being?”

Commander narrowed her eyes, but sat back down and made the bench creak in protest. “They are a traitor, but…a competent one. At this point, I can claim no better. Besides, they are the only Octarian in the entire military, including my fellow elites, including even the king himself, to have beaten Agent Three in hand-to-hand combat. Anyone who can show that Inkling scum the floor has my grudging respect. And envy.”

Topsail raked his fingers through his tentacles to disguise their agitated writhing, and he choked back his defense of Caspian with so much force it felt like he was biting at invisible reins. If she said a single disparaging word about Maya, he didn’t think he’d be able to hold his tongue.

Commander did not acknowledge his vexation even though she was staring right at him and surely noticed. She made a move as if to reach for her weapon, but instead rested her hand on her knee. “I’ve been thinking about yesterday. Your…excursion into the domes.”

 _Yesterday?_ Topsail wanted to shout. _Something else significant happened between then and now!_ He smothered the thought, like always. “And?”

“I…apologize for what I said to you. I was harsher than I needed to be.”

He mulled this over for some time. The last thing he’d expected out of her mouth was an apology, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe she didn’t have an ulterior motive. What that was, he had no idea…and more importantly, what was he supposed to say in response? He wouldn’t say it was okay, because it wasn’t. He wouldn’t tell her he forgave her, because he didn’t. He finally settled on the most awkward resolution. “Thanks. I guess.”

She didn’t react. “It didn’t occur to me that you would be…out of practice. It has been a while since you’ve held a weapon, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but…nothing would’ve changed if I’d been out turf-warring the day before. I told you it’s just not something I’m good at, and you didn’t believe me.”

“You mean you’re always like this?” She sat up, the beginning of a scowl wrinkling her face.

“That’s what I’ve been saying.” It was so difficult to keep his tone neutral when his aggravation was pushing insistently against his throat.

She stood, grabbing her charger. “Then your training begins today. Come here.”

“Hey, wait, hold on—”

She shoved the charger into his hands and steered him toward the inflatable training dummies on the opposite side of the clearing. Her hand between his shoulder blades burned him through his layers. “Surely even you can hit an inanimate target.”

“You’d be surprised,” he muttered, trying to balance the enormous gun in his hands. The thin metal piping was warm from the sunlight, like it was alive. “I…prefer chargers with scopes.”

“The principle is the same. Besides, it will be that much easier to learn your favored weapon after you’ve mastered the variant that poses more of a personal challenge to you.”

He wanted to laugh at the idea that he’d “master” anything. This weapon was already too alien for him to feel comfortable holding—much longer, and heavier, than the one he’d borrowed yesterday, or the loaner splatterscopes he’d default to using whenever he was roped into casual turf wars. He could say no, he could tell her not to waste her time, but…it wasn’t every day a decorated sniper offered him private lessons. And knowing what was unfolding…he gave the goo on her shoulder a quick glance and tried not to shudder. Maybe he shouldn’t squander this opportunity to learn basic competence with a weapon.

“Get a feel for it while I fetch an ink tank.” She was gone from his side in an instant, vanished into the cabin. If he didn’t know any better, he’d almost think she were eager to teach. He did what she suggested, trying to find the charger’s center of balance, hoisting the ink reservoir over his shoulder in preparation to fire.

She returned a minute later, carrying not just an ink tank, but also another gun. The green-and-black charger that had been mounted on the wall. Agent Two’s charger. Marie of the Squid Sisters’s charger. Insanity.

She took her own weapon from him as he put on the ink tank, did his usual song-and-dance of jamming the tube into his neck and holding back a pained growl. She shook her head as she passed back the gun. “You have to relax.”

“I know. It doesn’t work for me. I have to force it.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t push it, instead sweeping her arm out toward the dummies. He held the middlemost one in his sights, held his breath, and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil made the gun’s reservoir bump against his shoulder and he almost staggered. The central point of his shot missed the target by inches, splashed its side but mostly just stained the grass to its eleven.

He had at least two more semi-charged shots left—he aimed again, but Commander’s hand on his other shoulder stopped him dead. “At ease.” She waited for him to lower the barrel. “You’re afraid.”

_What, like, in general? Absolutely._ He said nothing.

“I can feel your tension just by looking at you. You aren’t comfortable wielding a weapon. You fear the consequences of misfiring. You fear failure.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he grumbled, glaring daggers into the splatter of blue on the ground.

“It’s because you don’t trust yourself.”

“Well, yeah, why should I?” He indicated the errant splotch of ink with a disgusted wave of his hand.

“Has it not occurred to you that this is a feedback loop? A self-fulfilling prophecy? You’ve left yourself no room to succeed.”

He scoffed, dropping the reservoir from where it was nestled into his shoulder. “Spare me. This isn’t a problem that can be solved if I just believe in myself. If it were that easy, I wouldn’t be such a fuckup.”

“It’s not that easy. But that isn’t the problem. You gave up.” The look she regarded him with was…weird. There was no contempt in her eyes, nor pity. Topsail almost wanted to call it disappointment. “I understand that your…circumstances didn’t give you much freedom to even make mistakes, much less learn from them. Those in charge of you failed you by putting you in an environment so disadvantageous to learning.”

Now it was his turn to shoot her a look. Had he heard right? She had the chance to criticize him, but passed it over and blamed the military instead? Impossible.

“But you cannot allow that situation to hurt you from the past. You must learn to rely on yourself. You are all you have, so act like it.” She pointed at the dummies. Topsail squinted at her for another moment before getting back into position with a noise somewhere in between a grunt and a sigh.

Her hands were on him, adjusting the way he held the charger, twisting him a few degrees. “You must respect the weapon’s power without fearing it. In the end, it’s only a tool. You decide when it fires, and on whom. It is a responsibility that you must embrace without reservation.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Is hitting the goddamn target always this much of a philosophical quandary?”

She cuffed him on the shoulder, lightly enough that it was painless. “The _mouth_ on you. By the seas. Shut up.”

She finally released him and stepped back, holding a hand up to stop him from moving. So he didn’t, kept stone-still as she circled around him, pressing her fingers to her chin. “Internalize this position. Remember how it feels. Ingrain it into your muscle memory. Half the reason your aim is so horrendously off is because you weren’t holding the gun right.”

“And the other half?” he ventured, trying to move his lips as little as possible to speak.

“Lack of skill. Which is not the death sentence you have taken it for. Every skill is learned, and can be practiced and improved upon.” She looked him up and down, nodding slowly. “You’re like me. A perfectionist. You would rather not do something at all than do it poorly. But you _will_ do things poorly when you’re inexperienced. Make peace with that fact. You learn nothing from running away.”

 _You’re like me._ Those words made his stomach turn. Another irreverent comment found its way to his tongue, but he kept his mouth shut, knowing he was on thin ice.

She leaned in close to him and his skin prickled. “The enemy in in sight,” she hissed into his ear. “Your friends are gone, they can’t help you. Everything rides on this—one—shot. There are no second chances.”

“You just said I had room for error now!”

“Yes, child, because this is practice. It’s pretend.” Her eye-rolling was audible. “Now decide whether you live or die. Go!”

She pointed across the clearing, her blue-tipped claw spearing the empty air. He didn’t even feel himself pull the trigger. The crack of the shot bounced off the canyon walls. The dummy exploded in a shower of blue. A moment later, amidst a happy little _ding!_ , a brand new one inflated in its place.

He twisted around to face Commander. She returned his gaze, her arms folded, the pile of teal on her shoulder still as the grave. As he watched, the very corner of her mouth curved upward. “You live. Do it again.”

As unwieldy as her personal weapon was—an e-liter, apparently—once he got used to it, it wasn’t _awful_ to use. It was, at least, in pristine condition, which he could not say about any of the beaten-up splatterscopes he’d borrowed in the past. But he did miss the extra security of the scope, and felt that its absence was the primary reason he was _still_ so bad at this. Even so, Commander got more animated the more he progressed, though her tone remained flat.

“You can consistently hit a stationary target while remaining stationary yourself. Start moving.

“Your scoped weapons won’t allow you to store a charge while moving, but this one can. So practice it, just in case.

“It’s time you graduated to moving targets.” She stepped between him and the row of dummies, her arms open. “Come at me.”

 _“What?”_ Breathless, having shed his lab coat and wishing he’d somehow had the foresight to wear shorts instead of jeans two days ago, he pointed the end of the charger at the ground as he stared at her in disbelief. “I can’t try to splat you!”

“You can try all you want, but you won’t hurt me. Our ink signatures are identical. And I welcome the cooling splash of ink against this dreadful heat.”

They were naturally ink-matched. Topsail grit his teeth. He lifted the barrel and fired, like the shot of ink leaving the weapon would with it take his queasiness. Commander sidestepped it. “Slow.”

He’d grow to hate that word, echoed back at him every time he fired, more consistently than the actual echo from the canyon walls. When he did finally connect a shot, she’d get faster, her ink— _his_ ink—flying with her erratic movements.

“Be one step ahead!” she hollered at him from across the clearing, diving in and out of the puddles on the ground as Topsail tried to close the distance. “Use the range to your advantage! I’m not even firing at you yet!”

Sweat poured down his face, stinging his eyes. He was losing his touch, his shots becoming more random, more haphazard. Commander came to a stop, formed upright, and approached him. “That’s enough—”

_Splat._

The force made her take a staggering step back. The giant patch of ink had hit its mark dead center, in the middle of her abdomen. The icy glare she fired back said more than any number of words could.

“Sorry. Muscle memory.” Topsail held the e-liter at resting position and did his very damn best to beat down the smile that threatened to cross his face.

She wiped the ink off her armor with a swipe of her forearm and a roll of her eyes. “You’re getting sloppy. In a real battle, you have no choice but to push through your exhaustion without sacrificing your performance. But given how far you’ve come in such a short time, I will allow you a break.”

“Wow, thanks.” He ached all over—muscles he didn’t even know he had. The ink tank’s connector tube was irritating the sensitive tissue of the inside of his siphon. His hands were sweating so much he’d lost his grip on the trigger more than once. It took everything he had in him to not groan in relief when Commander took her e-liter back from him, and he was able to drop the ink tank to the ground, pressing his fingers into the knots that had developed in his shoulders.

“Besides, Agent Eight is awake.” Commander tilted her head to the cabin’s window. “For some time, in fact. I hope they enjoyed the show.”

Eight wasn’t visible now, they’d probably stepped away from the window when it was clear things were winding down. Topsail couldn’t help but tense, the familiar tsunami of self-consciousness sweeping him away. They were the only one who hadn’t seen firsthand how terrible he was at combat, until now…

The sanitization goo atop Commander’s shoulder twitched, and she let out a breath that was a little too heavy to be normal. He remembered himself. “Yeah, I—I’ll go talk to them. Be right back.”

The cabin wasn’t air-conditioned—frankly, Topsail was surprised it even had electricity—but there were a number of fans running, and even the shade alone was a huge improvement over the sunbaked clearing. Topsail let himself collapse into a chair at the table and mumbled something appreciative as Eight tossed him a bottle of water from the mini fridge.

“I’m so glad to see you and her getting along!” they said, seating themself at the opposite end. Their hazel eyes were alight and their tentacles swayed gently.

Topsail downed half the water bottle before even pausing to breathe, and forced himself to set it down. “Uh, yeah…we…haven’t talked about it.”

All the enthusiasm drained from Eight’s face in an instant. “Of course not,” they sighed.

“Yeah, I know, it’s just…” He hadn’t been lying when he told Maya he wanted to talk to Commander, about _that,_ but working up the courage to confront her without feeling like all his organs would turn inside out—that was an entirely different story. “Not now. Not when I’m focusing on other things. This sounds weird, but…can you tell me about the Calamari Inkantation?”

Eight beamed again, the cabin’s weak overhead light glimmering off their teeth. “That song means so much to me. I don’t know when or how I first heard it, but I woke up in the metro with it stuck in my head, like it belonged there. I just instinctively knew that it was a product of the surface, and…it embodied the promise of a better life. It was…my only source of comfort down there. The one thing that kept me going through it all.”

Their magenta-tipped claws tapped out a distinct rhythm against the wood of the table— _one, and three, and one, and three-and-four-and-one…_

“Do you think that…that’s an inherent property of the song itself? Or would any other music have had the same effect, as long as you had that emotional attachment to it?”

Eight regarded him thoughtfully, one of their upper fangs pressing gently into their lower lip. “Interesting question…but I don’t think I have a definitive answer. It’s so special to me because it was my first taste of the surface. I can’t really imagine replacing it with any other song, but then I hardly _knew_ any other songs…” They tilted their head, their brows coming together. “That’s right. You preceded the hypnogoggles initiative, didn’t you?”

That term didn’t sound any more real, or less contrived, than the last time he’d heard it. “That’s code for something, right? Something less…stupid?”

“It is exactly what it sounds like. And exactly as stupid.” Eight shook their head, smiling like their skin was stretched too tight over their face. “They were brainwashing devices. Every Octoling soldier, from the lowest grunt to the elites like your m—like Commander, had to wear a pair a minimum of twelve hours a day. I wish I could tell you more about how they worked, but if I ever knew, I don’t remember it now. I just remember…how it felt to wear them.”

Their face darkened, their eyes distant. “They blasted you with…I don’t even want to call it music, just…noise, constant noise. Straight into your eyes, penetrating through your mantle as if it were wet paper. It was impossible to tune out when it was—coursing through you, just as your ink and blood run through your veins. It drowned out your thoughts, until there were no more thoughts to have, and then your body was functionally under the control of whoever was handling the playlist that day. Fighting it just made it worse. You just learned to…give yourself up to it until it was over.”

Their fingers were twitching on the table, and they brought one hand up to their mouth, gnawing almost delicately at the claws on their fingers. “The effects lasted even after you took them off. It never seemed to affect two people the same way…some of them had all their thoughts and memories and—and _sapience_ rush back all at once, and it overloaded them every time…but others would retain less and less, even after awakening. You’ll never guess which category I belonged to.” They offered another strained, cheerless smile. “Either way, after a day of wearing the hypnogoggles, we spent what little downtime we had trying to remember, or cope with, who we were. No one had the energy to spare on…what, conspiring against our higher-ups? Planning an escape route out of the domes? I still don’t even remember my own _name!”_

Some sick feeling welled up in Topsail’s gut, forcing him to breathe shallowly. Words formed on his tongue only to melt away in the face of how hollow they would sound spoken allowed. Commander had all but blamed the “initiative” on him, his successful escape. How many Octolings just like Eight had been reduced to drones after he did the unthinkable, the unforgivable?

The brief, if intense, flash of anger that lit up Eight’s face drained away just as quickly. “Admittedly, that’s not…entirely the fault of the hypnogoggles. The fall I took into the Deepsea Metro likely had something to do with it…I think it broke my pair, and also chased away what few memories I had left. Some details of the Octarian regime slowly came back to me over time, but anything about myself and my life, before the metro, before Cap’n Cuttlefish and Agent Three, is just…lost.”

They dropped their hand from their face, meeting Topsail’s eyes with something like exasperation narrowing their own. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I neither want nor need your pity—for one, I know I’m not the only one to have emerged from the domes with nothing but a name. You, on the other hand—you _have_ a past. You have history, you have tangible influence. That is endlessly more fascinating than just—” they snapped their fingers, “basically being born yesterday. I would much rather listen to your sob story than mine.”

So this was how it felt to be on the other end of the microscope. Topsail felt like he should be more offended by the analysis, but could only muster bemusement. “It really doesn’t bother you that you literally don’t know who you used to be?”

Eight shrugged. “Not so much anymore. Why does it matter? I only have control over who I am here and now. Agonizing over the may-have-beens has gotten me nowhere, so I stopped. I don’t view it as a loss, more like a…a factory reset. I am Agent Eight now, and I would never want to be anyone else. Whoever the old person was, I can just…let die, without a trace. It’s freeing.”

That sentiment, at least, Topsail could understand. As if he’d never wished he could just erase all evidence of his existence before the age of eighteen. Of course, that hadn’t been an option for him, so he’d had to do the work of reconciling the past with the present, which…in hindsight, maybe wasn’t _so_ bad.

And speaking of… “Uh, by the way, thanks for…sticking up for me when Commander was…you know…not referring to me correctly…”

“Oh, of course.” Eight smiled, waving their hand as if to dismiss his gratitude. “I am pretty sure I didn’t start out life as a ‘they,’ either. I’m sorry that she outed you in front of me…but I don’t think Three or Four caught on, if that helps.”

It did, and the comfort Topsail derived from it equally filled him with shame. He didn’t really mind if Maya knew—he just wanted the eventual reveal to be on his own terms—but Caspian? He hadn’t allowed himself to think about that yet. His hearts pounded at the mere notion, a warning for him to quit while he was ahead.

“Anyway. We were talking about the sanitization…and your theory.” Eight raised their eyebrows. “My point in sharing all of that was…I do believe there is a basis behind a given musical piece affecting its listeners in more than the, I guess, ‘normal’ way. But I couldn’t tell you how or why. I think you should talk to Three—he knows music on a much deeper level than I do, and he’s had firsthand experience with the sanitization.”

Topsail’s hearts continued their heavy, near-painful rhythm at the mental image of Caspian, of his vivid magenta eyes, of the scar swallowing the right side of his face. _Yeah, no problem, I’ll just stroll right up to my crush and ask him to tell me about probably his most traumatic experience._

_Wait._

_Oh my god I do **not** have a crush on him no no no no no_—

Eight, thankfully, misinterpreted the widening of his eyes. “Obviously he doesn’t _like_ to talk about it, but if you can convince him that you’re onto something, he’ll likely tell you whatever you want.”

That didn’t help. Topsail reached for his water and chugged the rest, hoping it would distract Eight from the blood rushing to his face.

“And, for what it’s worth…” Eight’s eyes were distant again, paying no attention to his sudden restlessness. “I don’t think you’re at fault for the hypnogoggles situation. How could you have known that would happen? It wouldn’t shock me if they were planning on ‘resorting’ to that all along, they just needed an excuse to roll it out…”

While Topsail appreciated their words, they did little to alleviate the dense weight of guilt that sat at the bottom of his stomach, holding him down. “Thanks,” he muttered through gritted teeth, at a loss for anything else to say.

Eight opened their mouth and then shut it quickly, peering over Topsail’s shoulder. He knew what was coming even before he twisted around in his chair.

“Commander,” Eight greeted her with a businesslike firmness he’d forgotten they were capable of. “Is his break over already? It’s barely been five minutes.”

He felt himself wince at the way they challenged her, while also desperately wishing he had their guts. Commander gave them a scowl, from which they did not flinch away, before relenting, “I suppose not. I only wanted to get out of the sun for a bit.”

She wandered into the back of the cabin, far enough away that Topsail could almost put her out of his mind. He fell into his usual seated slouch, took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. Then he gave up entirely and rested his forehead on the table amidst a groan.

Eight snorted. “I feel that.”

“Glad my suffering is relatable,” he mumbled into the wood.

Eight stood up and patted him on the shoulder as they maneuvered around him. The touch, he found, was not intolerable.

He let the time pass him by in a sluggish haze typical of a summer afternoon until Commander summoned him again, hours or months later. She handed him her e-liter, her lips twitching. “Now show me what you can really do.”

-

Before he even opened his eyes, Caspian registered pain. Like someone had taken a kitchen mixer, jammed it straight through his right eye, and scrambled his brains into a paste. He ached everywhere besides, his muscles screaming as he tried to roll over, the salty-metallic taste of ink and blood on his tongue. Wind whipped past his face despite the cold, solid surface he felt beneath him, and he was kind of concerned about that, but opening his eyes even a crack invited in far too much light. He groaned, but his throat was dry and so it came out more like a whimper.

He felt hands on his shoulders—he wasn’t wearing his leather, his protective spikes—and a familiar voice tickled his ear. “Don’t go rolling off into the ocean now, Three! You’re fine. It’s all over.”

Cap’n Cuttlefish. Hearing him speak filled Caspian with relief for reasons he couldn’t really articulate. He’d been worried about him, he thought, but couldn’t remember why. He leaned against the old squid as he got his bearings, his arms trembling as he pushed himself up to a sitting position. “Take it easy,” Cuttlefish murmured.

The insides of Caspian’s eyelids burned orange, amorphous shapes floating untethered through the void. It was hard to hear anything over the choppy wind and the roar of something that sounded like an engine. Slowly, though, his eyes were adjusting, even though his right one stung. “Cap,” he croaked, inwardly shuddering at how frail and shaky his voice was. “What happened?”

Cuttlefish didn’t answer. Caspian felt him tense, felt his fingers tighten their grip on his shoulders. “A lot. Don’t worry about it just yet, kid.”

“Yo, is he gonna be okay or what?”

Caspian flinched at the new voice. They weren’t alone. He wanted his shooter, but knew somehow it wasn’t within his reach, and he’d never felt so naked. Instinctively, he shrank further into Cuttlefish.

“He’ll be fine,” Cuttlefish replied, his voice reverberating through his chest and into Caspian’s ear. “He’s our Agent Three! Nothing can keep him down!”

Caspian had no doubt Cuttlefish was being genuine, but the praise was hard to believe when he felt so battered. He pulled away, drinking in the fresh air and letting it fill his chest. Fragmented as it was, his short-term memory began to trickle back into his head. The endless, sterile halls of the lab facility spread out in his mind’s eye, making his guts twist. But now he was alive, and back on the surface, and he’d never have to return to that hellhole again. That was all that mattered.

He wrenched his eyes open, blinking back tears at…the sunrise over the ocean. That was what he thought, at least, since there was something in his right eye that made it cloudy. He reached up to wipe at it and Cuttlefish grabbed his wrist. “Sorry, Three, but…you probably shouldn’t touch it.”

“What _happened?”_ Caspian repeated with more fire, fighting Cuttlefish’s grip to no avail—the old squid was much stronger than he looked, and Caspian was so _weak…_

He turned and his hearts jumped into his throat. Even with his swimming vision, he picked out three people on the platform beside him, all gawking at him.

“You mean you don’t remember?” The one that spoke now was one of the taller ones, her skin as dark as Caspian’s own, her tentacles an interesting gradient from brown at the roots to pastel green. An Octoling, Caspian decided, seeing the giant cream-colored suckers on their outsides. Her face was pinched in worry. He could have sworn he’d seen her before.

However, she was not the reason he was now frantically digging through his recent memory, turning up absolutely nothing. He grit his teeth. “No, but—I do, I know _something_ happened, I just…”

“Maybe it’s better if you don’t,” the one that had spoken before said, giving a flippant shrug. She was much shorter, about the same height as Caspian’s little sister who hadn’t even uprighted yet, and dressed in white and pink as if to contrast her companion’s darker colors and complexion. She held a wireless microphone in one hand, though Caspian’s less-than-perfect vision and less-than-relaxed demeanor made him think it a weapon. His common sense kicked in not a moment too soon, though, stopping him from further embarrassing himself by cowering into Cuttlefish. “Eight kinda thrashed you,” the tiny Inkling continued. “I wouldn’t wanna remember that, either.”

Caspian’s brain took its sweet time picking apart her words. Agent Three did not get _thrashed._ The ache of his entire body suggested otherwise, though. He locked eyes with the only person on this platform who had yet to speak: another Octoling, crouched at his eye level, magenta ink, clad in the sleek black pleather characteristic of the Octarian armies. He’d seen those widened hazel eyes before, behind a wall of glass, as blades the length of his entire body whirled inches above their head.

He hadn’t realized he’d started shaking until Cuttlefish patted his back. “You’re okay, Three.”

 _I don’t fucking think so._ Caspian would have clawed at his eye if Cuttlefish didn’t still have his wrist in an unyielding vice grip. The Octoling—Agent Eight, who else would it be—saw his hands jerk, saw his teeth bared, and the worried expression that crossed their tan face made his guts twist on themselves.

“I…” The sheer volume of the words that flooded his brain crushed it, grinding it into a powder. Pain flicked from temple to temple, and he lifted his other hand to his face, away from his eye. His stomach churned. It was all too easy to recall the foreign fingers that dug into his mind. That took his body away from his control. That chewed up his thoughts and replaced them with emotions too intense to handle, fear too strong to hide, rage too powerful to extinguish. This Octoling had been on the receiving end of it all. What could he possibly say?

“I’m sorry.” The statement hung dead in the air like the helicopters that hovered above—and speaking of, where did this _fleet_ come from? He eyed the Inkling and the other Octoling, mostly so he wouldn’t have to look at Eight anymore, but it was agitating him how he felt like he knew them, too.

“No,” Eight answered, and Caspian’s attention jumped back to them. They stammered for a few moments, and he remembered—right, fucking duh, Octarians speak Octarian. Learning Inkling as a second language was a battle all its own, he was sure. “Do not,” Eight managed after an encouraging nod from the other Octoling. “You, you…do not have…the fault.”

 _Dude, I tried to kill you._ He bit back this thought, lacking the energy to argue. His eye stung and it was taking every modicum of his willpower to not touch it, knowing why— _it’s still on me, it’s still inside me, get it **OUT** —_

The short Inkling let out an awed whistle. “Damn, check out this view! Hey, Eight, ain’t the Inkopolis skyline against the sunrise the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen? …Aside from someone else,” she added, elbowing the other Octoling with a grin.

“Hush, Pearlie!” The admonishment came with a giggle and a faint flush of blue in her cheeks. Then, presumably, she translated the words into Octarian for Eight, but Caspian paid no attention, too struck by the piece he was missing finally falling into place.

“Holy shit. You’re Pearl Houzuki.”

She turned to him with a raised eyebrow and he felt the need to explain himself. “My, uh, my best friend’s a fan of your early work. He’s a huge metalhead and he really wishes your old band got off the ground more than it did.”

Pearl had broken into a toothy smile at his words. “Your friend’s got good taste! The world slept on Dudes Be Sleepin’, but it deserves the devotees it has. Hey, ‘Rina, we should do something with it sometime!”

Caspian next turned to Marina Ida, thinking it rude to compliment one half of Off the Hook and ignore the other. “I’m not much into the pop scene, but…you guys consistently drop some pretty good stuff. Uh, what’s the one with the sick keytar solo…?”

Now Marina beamed. “Oh, thank you! Muck Warfare’s one of our favorites, too.”

It was so…easy to think and talk about music, in a way that no other subject was. It almost felt like it soothed the lingering irritation in his eye. But the section of his brain behind his eye immediately developed a painful pressure, like it was being squeezed until it burst.

He ignored it, trying to find words rather than focus on this new, annoying pain. “You know, me and the friend I mentioned earlier, we started a band of our own. We’re, uh…brand new, and our scene is…way different from yours, but…”

“You wanna collab? We can collab.” Pearl’s eyes were alight with a fire that Caspian recognized, had felt himself any number of times, a feeling that flared bright, buried in his very soul. “I wouldn’t trade OTH for anything, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the bad old days sometimes. Hit us up when you’re ready and we’ll work something out.”

Caspian grinned, but it felt too wide for his mouth, even though he wasn’t forcing it. His limbs were getting heavy, while his head felt like it had detached from the rest of him, beginning to float away. He was talking and didn’t really know why. “Oh, dude, you just wait. The guitarist we just hired is a fuckin’ beast, the way he shreds is insane, you’ll love it. And our drummer, man, she’s a godsend, she’s the only one out of all of us who even almost knows what the fuck we’re doing, she’s the glue that holds us together, like the drums should—and, oh fuck, _Hudson!”_

He tried to sit up straighter, but his body wasn’t very cooperative, so he flopped back against whatever—whoever?—was propping him up, he couldn’t quite remember. He clung to the image of his best friend in his mind’s eye as his hearts thumped. His eye hurt again, but nothing could stop the torrent of words that spilled from him. “When he sings, it’s like the fuckin’ _world_ stops in its tracks. With every note you can _feel_ how much he loves it, how much it means to him, and—to hear him singing the words I wrote myself? It’s just—it’s so—it hurts sometimes. To be so close to him but know he’ll never feel the same. I don’t know how not to love him. I’m just glad he’s…still my friend, even after…god, I’m really tired…”

Agent Three’s babbling got quieter and quieter until he’d lapsed into unconsciousness. Grunting with effort, Cap’n Cuttlefish supported his weight as he shifted to lay him back down on the platform, resting his head in his lap.

Pearl fished in her pockets for her phone. “Yeah, I’m gonna tell the boys to make a beeline for the nearest hospital.”

“That would…probably be best. Not just for his sake, either…” Marina cast a nervous glance to the back of Eight’s torso. The open wound on the small of their back was raw and inflamed, leaking blue blood in thin rivulets. Marina didn’t want to think about how long it had been there, how much time it had to get infected…Eight had not once acted like it was bothering them.

They spun on their heel and Marina guiltily averted her eyes until they spoke in Octarian. **“Will he be okay?”**

 **“I…hope so. He’s tough, right?”** Marina offered them a quavering smile that, for once, they did not even try to return. **“Are** ** _you_ okay?”**

 **“I’m alive.”** Eight shrugged. They turned their back on her again, their arms folded across their chest, staring out across the ocean. Marina sympathized, knowing exactly what was going through their head, just as it had gone through hers as she’d clawed her own way out from the underground: _was this worth it?_

Cuttlefish sighed as he ran his fingers across the tops of Three’s tentacles, the same way he used to do with his granddaughters when they were kids, when one of them, usually Callie, would fall asleep in his lap. The boy was barely eighteen, and Cuttlefish had put him through so much…Three’s eye streamed. The goo had left a shimmering green residue on his skin, a splotchy pattern with his eye at the center. His eyebrow and some of his hair had been burned off—hopefully it would grow back. Hopefully his eye would heal. Cuttlefish would never forgive himself if it didn’t. He wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive himself anyway.

“Oh, Caspian,” he murmured, quietly enough that the others wouldn’t overhear, sending the words to be scattered on the ocean breeze. “I’m so proud of you…and I’m so sorry.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> obligatory direct octo expansion reference slash off the hook cameo, i know, i know. but if being in splatoon fandom has taught me one thing, y'all fucking love lesbian idols and i ought to do my part
> 
> it occurred to me as i was editing this chapter that hudson, frontman of caspian's band and his bff (and his crush for many years), has lived in my head as a fleshed-out character for forever but does not actually appear in this story aside from this first mention until the very end. so [here's more detail about him if you're curious.](https://twitter.com/plectronoceras/status/1310286557375414272) plus the rest of the band if you feel like scrolling. also remember that coc happens about two years after splat2/octo expansion


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first things first. you Will look at [this fanart of chapter 2](https://twitter.com/mercurybomber/status/1349706277602140161) my friend ben drew. if you like really clever designs for robots and aliens i would highly recommend checking out the rest of his art. he's also drawing a comic featuring a transmasc character and i have to assume if you're reading this fic you have some interest in that type of story
> 
> life is very much getting in the way of me completing this story, i need a solid chunk of time to dedicate to breaking through this brick wall i've hit and i'm not getting it, so progress has again slowed to near-nothing. the good news is it's at the end so i have several chapters, ergo several months, to work at it. my surgery i mentioned last time should still be happening in a couple months, it's not official like i hoped it would be by now but i'm anticipating it to happen between march and april. preparing for that is taking a lot of my mental energy. i'll update once or twice between now and then anyway.
> 
> (to be clear this is a gender-affirming surgery, i'm not about to die but it Is something i need and don't want to wait for any longer than i already have. recovery will be intense and i may go on hiatus again during.)
> 
> ANYWAY here's squids

While she had many conflicting feelings about the scenery of Octo Canyon, Maya had to admit the sunset over the stone spires was gorgeous. The air was still warm from the day’s heat, but the lack of direct sun had cooled things down. She stretched out as she stepped away from the sewer grate, pleased that even her bad arm only hurt a little from the motion.

An inky mass her same color shot out of the grate and landed easily on his feet behind her as he reformed upright. Her purple drained from his tentacles, leaving his natural green in its place—he insisted she be the one to lead, and that meant he had to match her ink signature to use the underground launchpad. Caspian squinted around the base, his default frown deepening just a little.

“Three! Four!” Eight waved at them from where they were seated outside the cabin, shoving tools and mechanical pieces off their lap as they stood. Caspian’s evident perturbation eased just a little at their voice. He gave them a nod as they approached.

“Are you still doing well?” Eight asked of Maya, tilting their head as they looked at her arm.

She flexed, grinning back the twinge of pain. “Fantastic. It doesn’t feel any worse than a bad bruise, now.”

“That is great! I will admit I was worried your initial bounce-back was a fluke…but, please, be careful still. The pain may be less, but when the wound is healing, it is especially susceptible. It would be bad to make it worse by doing something strenuous.”

Oh, good thing they weren’t doing on anything strenuous in the near future. Maya felt her smile falter. “Uh, yeah. Where’s T? I came out here to yell at him for ghosting me all day.” She’d expected him to be hanging out around Eight, because the alternative was…

“He and Commander are doing drills.” Eight nodded to the stone archway beyond the cabin that led out to the other sectors of the canyon. Maya thought it was a euphemism until she heard the unmistakable sound of semi-distant charger fire.

“Wait, are you serious? They’re armed? And shooting? At _each other?”_ Even as she spoke, more _crack_ s punctuated her words.

“That is generally what practice entails, yes,” Eight said dryly. “There is no danger—they’re naturally ink-matched. And from what I have seen, his technique has improved much.”

“Oh, I gotta see this.” She half expected Eight to protest as she strolled forward, but instead they fell in step behind her, as did Caspian.

The little path down to the rocky arch that separated the NSS home base from the rest of the canyon was familiar in a way she didn’t like. Almost everything that reminded her of being Agent Four put a bad taste in her mouth, really, and she did her best not to show it. If only they could all leave the past in the past…up closer, now, she could see crosshatched stripes of blue ink on the ground, painted up the stone formations. The sound of charger shots filled the air. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend the noise was fireworks. _Been a while since we’ve had a Splatfest…it’s probably for the best._

She remembered herself and ducked behind a rock, rather than stand in the line of potential fire—the two Octolings’ sparring may have been friendly, or something like it, but their ink would not treat her the same. Eight and Caspian both followed her example, taking cover beneath the archway but peering out from behind it. Maya allowed herself to peek over the top of her rock, and tried not to flinch at the shouting in Octarian—Commander’s doing, of course—accompanied by the sound of ink raining onto the dry ground.

She saw Commander first, still barking unintelligible words. She wasn’t wielding her usual e-liter, instead holding—was that _Marie’s charger?_ Either she’d taken it unwittingly, or that was a hell of a power move. She was breathing hard, drying ink and dying sunlight shining off her armor in equal measure. She’d wrapped her seaweed strands around her wrists like a boxer, and one of them was coming undone, but if she’d noticed, she didn’t care. She bounced her weight from foot to foot, and darted off when another glob of ink came screaming her way. She popped out of another nearby patch of ink to holler something else and then was gone again, firing two quick, uncharged shots as she moved, probably just because she could.

Something slithered out of the shadows drawn by the rock formations, uprighting almost right in front of Maya and the others, his back turned. He was, unignorably, shirtless, even though Maya imagined the ink tank’s straps against his shoulders would chafe like hell. The sheen of ink and sweat on his skin glistened in the evening light. Two pairs of gill scars, Maya’s scientific eye couldn’t help but note, four symmetrical crescent-shaped marks the color of his natural ink lining his abdomen. Statistically average—some sixty-odd percent of Inklings shared this trait. The rest, like her, bore three pairs instead. More than three or less than two were each characteristic of an autosomal disorder. She’d always wondered if Octolings, too, were bound to these same genetic rules. The phenotypic differences between the two species fascinated her. But she knew better than to think Topsail would respond favorably to weird questions about his body, and so had refrained from asking.

She got her second look ever at the scar on his right shoulder, bigger and crisper than the one over Caspian’s eye. His breathing was even more ragged than Commander’s. He balanced the borrowed e-liter on his shoulder as he dragged his other arm across his forehead.

Commander yelled something else at him from thirty feet away, and this time he responded. It was short, not more than one or two words, maybe just an affirmative, but Maya couldn’t help but be struck by how deep his voice went when he spoke Octarian. Eight also seemed to hit a different pitch when they were speaking, it, too—an inherent difference in the way the languages were constructed, maybe. From the throat versus from the chest. Maya was no linguistics expert yet found herself captivated.

She was about to call out when Topsail ran off, slipping into basal form with a practiced ease and swimming away. Commander fired at him from on high, and even though the friendly ink wouldn’t hurt him if the shots connected, he zig-zagged in his course to avoid it. He emerged from the ink to fling another blue stripe up a nearby rock wall, scaled it, and engaged in a full shoot-out with the elite sniper. The way he dodged her shots was nothing like the person Maya knew, had dragged with her to his first ill-fated Splatfest turf war. It was stupid, but she was proud. Especially when Topsail nailed Commander, scoring a hit between her neck and chest. She staggered back, looked down at herself…and gave a short bark of laughter, followed by her usual terse directive. Maya bet it was something along the lines of “do it again.”

She sneaked a look to her side. Eight and Caspian were just as fascinated as she was by the display…but in vastly different ways. She recognized the way Eight’s brow was furrowed—they were concentrated, picking up as much strategy as they could glean from merely watching the combat. Their analytic eye had always impressed her. Caspian, meanwhile…his eyes were locked on Topsail, and Topsail only, just a bit wider than they would normally be. His mouth hung open an inch. Maya had difficulty believing he was focused on the other’s technique.

Unbidden, an evil grin split her face. _I’m going to have so much fun with this._

Commander’s gaze swept out over the area. She and Maya both froze as their eyes met. Then she lifted a hand, palm out, toward Topsail, and pointed with her gun out toward the archway. Topsail followed it, and almost jumped when he saw the newcomers. In a moment he had thrown himself down from his rock ledge and was swimming toward them. Maya stepped out from behind her shelter.

“Hey, T, thanks for ignoring my texts all day, you ass!” she scolded, mostly jokingly, as he reformed in front of her. Okay, it was weird enough seeing him without a lab coat, much less half-naked. She kept her eyes on his face, and ignored the twisting of her gut, as she was unable to avoid glancing at the bandages on his cheek. She reached her voice down into her chest, artificially deepening it to mock his own. “ _I’ll keep you updated_ —remember that?”

“I, uh, sorry,” he said, the Inkling words forcing his own pitch upward. Not out of his normal range, but noticeably different from the Octarian he had just been speaking. He again hoisted the e-liter further onto his shoulder as he groped with his other hand for his phone in his pocket. “I’ve been…pretty busy, didn’t realize you were trying to…” As if awakening from a trance, he looked around at his surroundings, and up at the sky. His eyes widened. “Oh sh…how long has it been?”

“A few hours,” Eight replied, appearing beside Maya and giving him an encouraging smile. “It is so cool to see you taking her one-on-one! I was…never a very good sniper, but I feel like I am learning so much just by watching you two!”

“Don’t give me too much credit. She’s going really easy on me, and she wants me to know it.” Topsail shrugged.

“Dude, just take the compliment.” Maya shook her head, noting that only now, Caspian was warily creeping out from his cover to approach his fellow agents. It was hard to tell between the low light and the dark hue of his skin, but Maya thought there might be a flush of blue in his cheeks. It took everything she had to not break out in a grin again, but she settled for the next best thing, reaching out and poking Topsail in the stomach—quite soft and squishy. He let out a noise that was not unlike a squeak and jumped away from her. “Don’t!”

“Who gave you permission to go around topless?” she teased, wishing she could see the look on Caspian’s face but knowing that whipping around to stare at him would probably blow her cover.

“I only have the one pair of clothes I was wearing yesterday,” Topsail muttered, pointedly taking another step out of her reach. “That shirt’s already just about done, I didn’t want to ruin it beyond recognition. Also, I didn’t know the whole NSS would show up to ogle me.”

_Only one of us is ogling,_ Maya would have chopped off the tip of her other ear to say. Instead she went the safer route. “Not the _whole_ NSS. I mean, we can get One and Two in here if you want, but—”

“You can borrow some of my clothes,” Caspian mumbled. He was looking just past Topsail’s shoulder, in his direction but not at him. “Four did too, so…”

_Oh, come on, dude, commit. Don’t make it sound **less** gay. _The universe was testing Maya’s ability to hold her tongue, and she was afraid she’d bite clean through it before the night was over.

The implications weren’t lost on Topsail, either, suggested by the way he snapped his mouth shut and his eyes darted around, avoiding everyone’s face, especially Caspian’s. Maya wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or scream _just kiss already!_

She did neither, because Commander appeared inches behind Topsail, and her presence sapped the playfulness from the atmosphere. She murmured something, barely audible. Eight replied and Topsail nodded. Satisfied, Commander took her e-liter from him and stalked away, toward the cabin.

Topsail unhooked the ink tank’s tube from himself and let out a groan of relief that Maya felt in her very soul.

The four of them followed Commander, but not too closely, returning to the base. Maya and Topsail lagged behind a little bit; Topsail was clearly beat from spending most of the afternoon running around, and Maya, to her endless vexation, did not have the leg length required to easily keep up with her freakishly tall friends. She nudged Topsail with her elbow. “How’s that e-liter treating you?”

“It’s…” Topsail glanced up ahead, at Commander’s retreating figure, as if making sure she was far enough out of earshot. “Okay. But it’s not my style.”

“You like scopes, right?” That was what she thought she remembered from their previous turf war experiences. He nodded.

“And say you had your choice of sub. What would it be?”

He made a face, like he’d never had to consider it before, or maybe he’d determined, correctly, that this hypothetical question was not at all hypothetical. “I’m not _good_ with any of them, but I guess I find curling bombs the most reliable…why?”

“We’re gonna hook you up with a custom weapon.” Maya couldn’t help but beam. “Look, for what we’re about to do, we need everyone armed with whatever they’re best with, even if those setups are…unconventional. Or just straight up illegal. Fortunately, the guy who runs the weapons shop is a close ally of the NSS, so we get whatever we ask for. Also, the Squid Sisters _kinda_ line his pockets for it, but, you know. Small price to pay for saving the world every couple years.”

She nodded ahead at Caspian and Eight, talking in hushed voices that didn’t carry. “Three’s ancient-ass shooter was manufactured before autobombs were a major thing, but he’s got ‘em. Eight swapped out the Sting Ray on their favorite roller for the Inkjet. My dualies…actually aren’t modified in that way, I use the standard specs, but I routinely have Sheldon work on them to improve their firing rate and ink consumption. Again, super illegal. I don’t use that pair in turf, I’d be put on a watchlist.”

She could tell most of what she said flew over his head, so she gave him another nudge and a good-natured smile. “We’re gonna have you kicking ass with the rest of us. That sanitization shit won’t know what hit it.”

“The sani—” His eyes widened and he snapped his head up, biting his lip. “Right! I talked to Eight. What they said…didn’t kill my theory where it stands, so…”

“Oh, sounds promising.” Maya hadn’t _disregarded_ whatever Topsail’s idea was until now, but…she’d be lying if she said she’d been convinced anything would come of it. Though now that it seemed it was holding up under scrutiny, maybe she could afford to get her hopes up.

He shook his head. “You and I both know the lack of evidence denying it does not equal evidence supporting it. I’m not ready to submit it for peer review just yet. If you’ll pardon the analogy.”

“Nerd.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Oh, nice. Hit me with some more insults from the third grade.”

He laughed. Whatever lingering tension that lingered in her gut, from the atmosphere of Octo Canyon, from the situation that hung over them all, vanished. If only for a moment, because he sobered again. “I know it sounds…suspicious that I have this theory but won’t actually tell you what it is, I’m just…afraid I could be wrong. And I know at this point a wrong theory’s better than nothing, and it would be better if I just said it even if I don’t know it’s true—”

“Hey, it’s okay. I get it. I don’t think you’re being suspicious.” Maya had been grappling with that exact situation until earlier today, but decided against bringing up the whole _thing_ between him and Commander. She doubted he needed the reminder.

Her reply didn’t do much to relax him, as the ends of his tentacles twitched in that way they did when he was nervous, which was often. They both came to a slow stop in front of the cabin’s door, the other agents and Commander already having gone in. He scraped his teeth across his lower lip.

“Hey.” She knocked the back of her hand against his as it hung loosely at his side, and he turned toward her, his brows knitted. “I trust you, T. I’ve got your back.” She imagined going back in time even as little as a year ago, and telling her past self she’d look into an Octoling’s eyes as she spoke those words, and mean them with her every cell.

He smiled. “Thanks, Maya. I…I don’t know what I’d do without you by my side.”

She returned the smile, and waited for the moment to pass before she could ruin it by sucking in air through her teeth. “You wanna maybe toss in a ‘no hetero’ there?”

“Oh my god, shut up.” Though he shook his head, he couldn’t disguise his laughter from her. She let it fuel her as she pushed open the door to lead him inside, the light from inside washing over them both. It was all so close to normal…and she wanted nothing more than for things to be okay.

-

Maya was well-accustomed to the muffled beep followed by the click of the lock as the door to lab opened, it only happened fifty times a day. She paid it no mind, focused more on digging through the box of nitrile gloves, her back to the newcomer.

She recognized her boss’s voice. “And these two benches are ours—oh, and this is Maya, another PRA.”

Ah, another interviewee being shown around the lab. Not at all a bad thing. Maya welcomed a more permanent addition to lab than the constant cycle of summer students. Even one more person who could help her shoulder the responsibility of basic lab maintenance was more than worth their weight in gold. She turned to face Monodon and the new person, already wearing her friendliest grin. “Hey! I’m…”

An Octoling stared back at her. The bottom plunged out of her stomach. Fortunately, her rationality kicked in not a moment too soon, before she dropped the pair of gloves she held and reached for the weapons that were not holstered at her hips. This Octoling did not look like the ones she’d fought, barely even looked a threat, honestly. Three or four inches taller than her, something of a slender build, dressed in a plaid button-up and dark blue skinny jeans instead of the leather armor she’d subconsciously expected. Unarmed, for sure, because even turf-war-grade weapons weren’t allowed on campus at all. Dark blue ink and eyes to match, short but curly tentacles, round face and pale skin, glasses with square black frames. Nothing about this guy screamed anything except “nerd.” But she would be remiss to let her guard down, that was exactly what they wanted.

“This is Topsail,” Monodon said, indicating the Octoling with one of his many legs. “Set up to graduate from U of I this spring.”

Was that so? Maya plastered that grin back on and cursed herself for letting it fall. “Topsail”—what a weird name—dipped his head in a brief nod. “Hey,” he said, quietly but unshaken. The single word was not enough to hint at any accent.

And then Monodon swept onward, leading the newcomer through the rest of lab, leaving Maya behind to keep fumbling with her gloves. She watched the prawn and the Octoling vanish into the back hallways, staring after them for much longer than she needed to. What was _wrong_ with her? She dropped the glove and pressed her fingers to her temple. _You’re not Agent Four anymore. Don’t act like it._

The next day she’d dropped by Monodon’s office to ask him a question, and before she could leave he stopped her dead in her tracks. “Do you remember the person I interviewed yesterday? If you have any…reservations about him potentially being your coworker, I’d like to hear them.” 

Oh shit, he’d noticed. On went the big fake grin again. “Oh, no, nothing like that! I just…thought I knew him from somewhere. But I don’t think I do after all.” That wasn’t _entirely_ a lie, was it?

“Alright.” Monodon gave himself a satisfied nod. “The way it’s looking, he’s the best candidate for this position.”

Maya’s veins turned to ice and she hated herself for it. But then, if she would be working so closely with him, it wouldn’t be _weird_ to ask more questions. “I’m curious about him. You said he’s from U of I?”

Monodon nodded again, turning around in his chair to fiddle with his computer. “Soon-to-be graduate, obviously,” he said, pulling up Topsail’s resumé. “Degree in biochem…TA’d a genetics lab his junior year…”

“Spent all four years there?”

“Three and a half. Looks like.”

“Where’d he go to high school?”

One of his black, beady eyes sized her up. “You’re this convinced you might know him?”

She gave the appropriate awkward half-chuckle. “It’s gonna bug me all day if I don’t prove it to myself,” she said, and again it wasn’t quite a lie.

“Maybe you just had a big class with him in undergrad,” Monodon suggested. “He went to Inkopolis High, if that answers your question.”

“It does. I definitely don’t know him. Thanks for humoring me, though.” She gave her boss a smile that hopefully masked the discomfort that was currently tying her stomach in knots.

It didn’t make _sense._ Her eyes unfocused as she pretended to stare at her computer screen. Either the Octoling had lied about his education on his resumé—a gutsy move, honestly—or he really had been topside for a minimum of four years, possibly even longer. But the influx of Octolings from the underground had only just started, after she’d barely scraped out a victory over Octavio in the most terrifying fight of her life. The memories of being Agent Four made her fists clench of their own volition, and she allowed herself a ragged sigh as she pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

_You are not Agent Four anymore,_ she reminded herself, and hadn’t she retired for exactly this reason? All her other fellow agents seemed convinced they were in the right for fighting back, and she understood the urgency, knew that thousands of Inkopolitans would be in dire straits with their electricity compromised. But blasting countless Octarians in the face, sending them toppling over the edges of buildings, hearing the Octoling soldiers cry out in pain as she splatted them, even if they were tied to a respawn point and ultimately no worse for wear…it made her sick to think about. How could she look her potential coworker in the eyes and not think about all the blood and sweat and ink she had shed in a war against his people? A war that she increasingly regretted her involvement in with each passing day.

“They’re not sentient,” Marie had growled through her headset the first time Maya had encountered a standard Octarian trooper—an oversized, gelatinous tentacle with fat lips and unfocused eyes. Maya had balked, but Agent Two was having none of it. “It doesn’t feel pain. Pull the trigger, Four.”

Maya had believed her. She had nothing else.

Would…Would Topsail know the truth about the non-Octoling Octarians? Could he tell her Marie was right, assuage at least that part of Maya’s crushing guilt? The thought was hypnotically comforting, but reality set in a moment later and she scowled, shaking her head as to toss it from her brain. She was not Agent Four, she was your average Inkling, and your average Inkling had the barest grasp on Octolings even existing. Your average Inkling knew nothing of Octarians except what they had read in history textbooks, and was not concerned with their sapience. She ground her teeth. The absolute last thing she needed was to tell an Octoling she couldn’t trust that she was his enemy—what if he had faked all his documentation? What if he was a spy?

…For the seas’ sake, what on earth would he get out of infiltrating this tiny lab? They weren’t working with, like, earth-shattering information or government secrets here. Unless Octavio thought that the mechanisms of ink degradation would give him a leg up the next time he wanted to strike…

Maya resisted the urge to groan aloud now, and dropped her face in her hands. God, was she overthinking this. Topsail was, in all likelihood, just a guy. An Octoling who had pretended to be an Inkling for all his time on the surface. Who, to do that, had probably divorced himself entirely from everything Octarian. What right did she have to treat him like an enemy? He wasn’t even the only topside Octoling she knew of—she had only met “Agent Eight” once, and then she’d immediately retired from the NSS altogether, but from what little she saw of them, they didn’t seem bad at all. The captain and even Agent Three trusted them, at least, and that was—should have been—all she needed. And now that she thought about it, Marina Ida of Off the Hook was an Octoling too, though Maya had only been able to recognize that after her agent work. Thankfully her celebrity crush on her had faded, though she’d be lying if she said her hearts didn’t still flutter when she saw Marina’s face in the news.

Okay, enough of this. Maya sat up, burning with a new resolve. There was no bad blood between her and this stranger, and she would not pretend like there was. On the contrary, she would do everything in her power to make up for her initial, baseless mistrust. If absolutely nothing else, establishing a good relationship with her coworker early on would benefit them both.

She was ready for him when he walked in on his first day a few months later, spinning in her chair as he approached the end of her bench. “Hey! Good to see you, Topsail!”

He sized her up, she recognized the way his eyes narrowed, if only for a moment. It didn’t shock her that he’d be wary. “Um…good morning. Maya, right?” The way he spoke suggested he was choosing his words carefully. And he lacked an accent, even moreso than Marina. He had definitely been on the surface for a while.

She grinned. “Yep! Here, you can set your stuff down on this side.” She jabbed her thumb in the direction of the computer, and the bench, across from hers. “No one’s using this one, not since Rachel left for grad school.”

“Are you sure?” Now Topsail hesitated, his eyes darting from her face to the desktop she indicated, his eyebrows drawn in…not quite skepticism, but concern. But at her nod, he gave in, swinging his backpack off his shoulder and approaching to set it down with a clunk.

“Left you some notes,” Maya said, turning back to face her own computer even though all her attention remained focused on him. She heard him peel off one of the sticky notes she’d stuck to his monitor. “Couple people to email so you can get access to the network and the shared drive. I’m also gonna shoot you some protocols just so you have ‘em.”

“Oh. Uh…thank you.” She could tell he turned to look at her, and she spun back toward him just to be polite and make eye contact. Something caught in her throat when she looked him in the eyes, behind his glasses, and found that his pupils were horizontal and rectangular. And his fingers…the skin past his second knuckles was tinged blue, like his ink, and were those _claws_ on the ends? She forced down her kneejerk reaction, whatever it even was, with all her might, before it appeared on her face.

“You didn’t have to do all this for me,” he said.

_Oh, you have no idea._ “Don’t worry about it,” she said, giving a dismissive wave of her hand. “Makes this transition a little smoother on us both.”

He didn’t respond, one hand nervously reaching up to the lanyard around his neck, bearing the badge he’d used to get in. Maya squinted at it; the picture certainly was of him, unsmiling, in the same black shirt he was wearing right now. “Topsail Plectrono, BS,” the name read. So that wasn’t just a weird nickname…

“Oh, yeah!” She snatched another sticky note and a pen off her desk. Topsail leaned over her a little, trying to see what she was scrawling. When she finished she planted the note to the back of his hand, which made him wrinkle his nose as he peeled it off to read it.

“If you wanna reach me when I’m not here, I’m most responsive to text,” she explained. In a perfect world this next part wouldn’t even have to be said, but giving out her number to a nerd-type like him meant she needed to cover her bases. “And, uh, don’t take this the wrong way, I mean this in only a work sense. I’m _very_ gay.”

“Oh.” Topsail didn’t sound disappointed at this revelation, to her relief. Maybe more surprised? “Yeah, I’m…” He bit back whatever he was going to say with some force, and then turned his back on her, mumbling, “Yeah, thanks.”

She raised an eyebrow but didn’t pry. The point of this whole orchestration was to disarm herself, not him. And it was working. The more she watched him, listen to him speak, the less she could bring herself to believe he was anything more than what he presented himself as: a recent college graduate, a scientist somewhat lacking in social grace, and ultimately not a threat. That damnable “Agent Four” part of her brain was backing off, and she’d never been gladder for it to go.

By now Topsail had settled himself in his seat, his keyboard clacking briefly, then a pause as he waited for his computer to load. Maya swiveled around again, saw him now pecking at his phone.

“Hey, so, Monodon doesn’t usually come in for about another hour,” she said. “In the meantime I can show you more around lab. Tell you the more important things, like which fridges are ours, where we hide stuff so the other labs don’t steal it…”

He didn’t answer at first, pausing either to judge her intentions or consider his options. “You shouldn’t feel obligated to take away from your work for my sake.” Spoken with any harshness, this would have been a clear dismissal, but he just made it sound matter-of-fact. Like he was baffled by the mere idea that she’d go out of her way to help him. She had to wonder what his upbringing was like.

“This _is_ my job, dude. Also, you’re gonna be of no help to anyone if you’re constantly asking where everything is in this organizational nightmare of a lab.”

That got a laugh out of him, or at least she thought so, listening to him force air out his nose in a quiet huff. “Alright, fine, since you so insist.”

When he met her eyes, she offered him her usual bright smile. She wasn’t expecting to get one back, a small and awkward one that only lasted a moment, but it fueled her. The more she could get him to warm up to her…the less suspicious, _scared_ of him she’d be. Perhaps this wasn’t the healthiest base on which to build a friendship, but…she was doing the best she could with what she had. And if it prevented her from going full Agent Four on him should he sneak up on her one day, what did it matter what her motives were?

_You and me are gonna be best friends, dude. Mark my words._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am aware of the irony of writing "there haven't been any recent splatfests" on a weekend of a new splatfest but in my defense i wrote that line post-final fest and pre-round 2 splatfests. just, like, pretend that's still the case lol.
> 
> preemptively, before anyone tries to @ me about squid tits, in my headcanon afab inklings and octolings do not have breasts. they're not mammals. sorry. hell i don't even hc that they give live birth. anyway topsail being shirtless would not out him as being afab or trans. (though i still draw him with top scars because i can but they're not "canon.")
> 
> i hope i am the writer of the only splatoon fanfiction to discuss squid autosomal disorders. but if i'm not, link plz


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